Until the Pakistani Army swept into this small, hill-flocked valley on Nov. 3, Sararogha had served as the South Waziristan headquarters of the powerful terrorist group Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan -- known in English as the TTP. Despite the chaos since the death of its founder -- Baitullah Mehsud, killed by a U.S. drone strike on Aug. 5 -- the TTP had the area firmly in its grip, and made it a virtual black hole for government security and intelligence forces.

The TTP had seized the town in a surprise raid on a paramilitary fort on Jan. 25 last year. They instantly executed half of the two dozen Frontier Corps soldiers, a move that filled the roughly 8,000 inhabitants with fear and forced them into silence. The stones and debris still litter the ground of the fort -- the result of heavy artillery fire that the army used while entering the town. "It all started from here, the challenge to the state of Pakistan," Brig. Muhammed Shafiq, the commanding officer, told me during a recent visit. "Sararogha has turned into a symbol of the TTP terror in the region."

But this month, the Army overtook the town and its southern ridge -- Point 1345 -- which overlooks Sararogha and the road to the periphery of the valley. The fight for this point has been fierce and bloody, with one soldier losing one of his legs to gunfire from the TTP and al Qaeda militants. The soldier is currently under treatment at a military hospital in Rawalpindi, where the Pakistani Army is headquartered, and officials will not name him for security reasons. Officials claim they have killed more than 550 militants in the current campaign thus far, while suffering close to 100 casualties themselves.

Since access to the area -- dubbed the "terror den" by many Army officials -- is extremely limited and the military has choked all the arteries leading into it, independently verifying these claims is not possible. The entire civilian population has moved away, taking away potential sources of context. There are no precise counts of how many TTP and al Qaeda fighters there are in the region, though local journalists generally say 10,000 to 15,000. Regardless of the exact numbers, the most important consequence of the latest offensive is that the Army has wrested control over an area it had once lost.

Two things made this possible. First, squabbling between politically tainted Asif Zardari, the president, and Nawaz Sharif, the former two-time prime minister, following last February's elections resulted in uncertainty, inaction, and confusion in the war against militants. With power consolidated, the military has made swift, effective moves against the TTP and other forces.

Second, the terrorist bombings in Mumbai, India, on Nov. 26, 2008, halted fighting against terrorists in Pakistan as well. The civilian government "soft-pedaled" after allegations that Pakistani intelligence figures helped in the India plot emerged. The mistrust between the civilian government (considered to be too pro-American) and the military establishment (led by Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani) heightened, delaying action against militants in Waziristan. This allowed the Taliban and al Qaeda to perpetrate a reign of terror that almost completely eroded the writ of the government. It also led to an uptick in suicide attacks on civilians and the security apparatus in Pakistan.

But now, Pakistan is fighting in Waziristan again. Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, the Army's spokesperson, says taking the areas back from the militants is crucial to signal to "all and sundry that we would not tolerate any challenge to the state." In another hilly town claimed by the TTP and al Qaeda, Laddah, he said that you cannot allow a bunch of criminals to bully the state.

When the soldiers pushed the militants back, they found dozens of Arabic books, magazines, and teachers' manuals on warfare and bomb-building. These documents and others left at the seminaries in Sararogha and Laddah suggest not just the presence of Arab fighters but the convergence of al Qaeda and local militant groups.

Several hand-written notebooks explain how al Qaeda ideology binds followers of various shades of Islam together. One diary, belonging to someone named Shehzad Akmal -- a member of the Sunni Deobandi strand of Islam and a native of the Arabian Sea metropolis of Karachi, Pakistan -- describes his journey from the southern coast to the tiny mountainous town in Waziristan, from 2002 to the present. It took him to Kashmir, where militants have battled Indian forces since 1989, then to Lahore, where he twice attended the grand congregation of peaceful Muslim preachers in 2004.

Another diary appears to belong to a fighter with the Tehrik ul-Mujahideen. He details the evolution of his anti-India outfit, naming places and people and dates. The TM, one learns, is a Wahabbi organization that draws its ideological inspiration from the Saudi Arabian version of Islam.

The fact that the two authors belong to different branches of Islam and mention several Arab names as their contacts indicates that al Qaeda has galvanized Muslims across the spectrum. They put behind their ideological differences to join al Qaeda for its stated cause: Fighting the infidels led by America.

One of the pages of another notebook contains some interesting questions. What will the fate of our jihad against America be if Pakistan remains the same? How do we best fight the American-Jewish conspiracy against the Muslim umma?

This trove of materials, which also explain the configurations of suicide jackets and improvised explosive devices, underscores how these al Qaeda techniques of insurgency have traveled from Saudi Arabia through Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

A careful consideration of the campaign -- based on interviews with displaced persons as well as journalists from the region -- also explains how the TTP and al Qaeda took control in the first place. Swiftly and systemically, militants led by Baitullah Mehsud and now by his successor Hakimullah Mehsud pushed out the entire local civilian administration, murdered suspected government "collaborators," and then simply set up shop.

The Sararogha high school building, now damaged by artillery fire, served as Baitullah Mehsud's "court," where he met his regional commanders and pronounced punishments on opponents and dissidents.

A journalist threatened by the TTP who now lives quietly in Peshawar corroborated some of the horror stories collected by the Army and government officials. The U.S.-led ISAF troops in Afghanistan and Pakistani troops in Pakistan chased al Qaeda operatives on both sides of the Durand Line, the thousand-mile border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

This military concentration makes it unsurprising that the Taliban and al Qaeda have murdered more than 800 pro-government tribal elders and intelligence officials in the region in the past four years. The Islamist groups witch-hunt for collaborators, and then execute (often by beheading) the "spies." This practice has reached particularly alarming levels in Waziristan since 2008 as a result of the paranoia created by the drone strikes and other targeted killings by U.S. forces.

Since the Army offensive, these remote and deserted towns and villages seem in control. But the real challenge lies in retaining and consolidating that control and creating an environment that would allow the return of the civilian government officials and the tens of thousands of internal refugees who fled the bloody standoff.

Viewed against the scale of threat posed by the consolidating pan-Islamist forces, the Pakistani Army seems to be stuck in the Waziristan region for the medium to long term. But its presence here has certainly changed the dynamics of the militancy in the no-go tribal areas. The state is finally showing its teeth to an unholy alliance of local and foreign, al Qaeda-inspired and al Qaeda-sponsored non-state actors. The message this time around seems to be loud and clear: No matter what it takes and no matter for how long, such lawless behavior will not be tolerated.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev delivered his second state-of-the-nation address before the Russian parliament on Thursday. The speech's sternness and substance sounded like a sharp break with Russia's political and economic stagnation under President-turned-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who was seated in the front row as Medvedev spoke. No longer could the country continue its "humiliating" resource dependency, Medvedev said; no longer could business make a living simply by trading in foreign goods; no longer could the crisis -- which, Medvedev admitted, hit Russia especially hard -- be blamed on others.

For an hour and 40 minutes, Medvedev went on in front of an increasingly fidgety audience, spotlighting with admirable candor the things that are slowing Russia's progress into modernity. Some of his proposals -- like reducing the number of Russian time zones and introducing dance instruction in schools -- were bizarre. But the vast majority was amazingly spot-on, tough-love material more often heard in Western think tanks and opposition papers. Medvedev was telling Russians what they needed to hear: sink or swim. And, to the untrained ear, it sounded like a definitive break with the reign of Putinism, a legacy of corruption and autocracy to which Medvedev seemed to be setting himself up as a liberal foil.

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But like many Kremlin initiatives, Medvedev's new "openness" was a show, carefully staged and tested and re-tested. Two months ago, the president published an article titled "Onward, Russia!" in the online liberal newspaper, Gazeta.ru. It was a strange -- and strangely critical -- editorial, asking Russians why they clung to the past, to the addiction to natural resources, to corruption. It asked them, in an almost Obama-like way, to stop looking for blame abroad and to look for solutions at home, to move forward, to modernize. Medvedev even gave readers an email address where anyone could send their "practical plans for the development of our state." "Modernization," the editorial's leitmotif, instantly monopolized Russian political discourse.

Over the next two months some 30,000 people responded -- including one much-publicized futorologist. This was a signal from the Kremlin, a trial balloon for the November presidential address (much of which is generally passed quickly into law by the rubber-stamp Duma), and so there was daily speculation about what Medvedev would mention, and what he'd relegate to the radioactive bin. The essay's unprecedented openness -- or at least seeming openness -- piqued the interests of the chattering classes.

By the time the speech came, there was a twin feeling of suspense -- what will he say? -- and absolute apathy - we already know what he'll say.

The speech, when it came, was both surprisingly forthright and familiarly false-bottomed.

Modernity was the word of the day, as expected: Just as Russia once forged ahead through great sacrifice to become a major 20^th-century power, Medvedev said, "in the 21^st-century, our country again cannot do without all-encompassing modernization." And modernization à la Medvedev means technological innovation and the establishment of a Silicon-Valley-type center of ingenuity; making sure that at least 50 percent of medicines are manufactured in Russia; tossing up more satellites into space; cleaning out the ranks of the corrupted police force; jailing corrupt bureaucrats and covering the country in a blanket of broadband Internet; raising pensions; supporting NGOs and opening the electoral system; strengthening civil society and improving the education system; getting a handle on the hurly-burly of the North Caucasus and putting an end to "puffing out our cheeks" in foreign policy.

And Medvedev had the courage to talk of reforming Russia's essentially one-party, Kremlin-controlled political system, and even made a meaningful gesture -- eliminating signature-gathering as a prerequisite for participating in elections (this is the main tool to disqualify unfriendlies). But all pretense fell away as soon as he said, "On the whole we can say that the multi-party system in the Russian Federation has come together."

There were plenty of other double-take moments in the address. Medvedev’s proposals to promote technological innovation sound great -- were it not for the fact that they were more of the same, old, Soviet methodology: top-down, mandated progress relegated to inefficient, bureaucratized production centers. He also offered federal representation for parties that didn't meet the 7 percent threshold nationally -- another key tool for keeping real opposition out of the federal parliament -- but got over 5 percent in regional elections. It would have been a generous concession, were it not for the fact that not a single party exists that meets these criteria. (That, and one decorative seat in a parliament where the president's party has enough votes to change the constitution, is cold comfort.)

Another head-scratcher came when Medvedev talked of supporting non-governmental organizations -- just as two of Russia's oldest human rights organizations, including Andrei Sakharov's Helsinki Group, were evicted from their Moscow offices without explanation. And yet, if you read his speech closely, there was no contradiction: Medvedev talked only about the kinds of NGOs that deal with orphans, not with human rights abuses in Chechnya. To him, the latter class of NGOs are but wreckers and saboteurs.

And then came the real zinger. "Strengthening democracy does not mean weakening the social order," he said, adding that "any attempts, under democratic slogans, to ... destabilize the government and fracture society will be intercepted." It sounded chilling enough to negate all prior talk of political thaw.

Even members of United Russia, the president's own party, seemed skeptical for reasons beyond the speech's contradictions. "These addresses are always good," says United Russia Duma deputy Boris Resnik. "There are no bad ones. Everyone says the right words. We'd like to see these ideas brought to life, and there are many, many obstacles: routine, inertia, indifference, satisfaction with one's little feeding trough."

But those are not, actually, the main hurdles to achieving the ambitious reforms Medvedev laid out in his address. He spoke of nothing short of systemic change, yet much of what he proposed was either vague and impossible to implement, or overly specific and superficial. And, as the crisis has clearly demonstrated, Russia is beyond cosmetic help; Russia needs a quadruple bypass.

Furthermore, notes Masha Lipman of Moscow's Carnegie Center, even if all the electoral reforms were implemented -- as were the electoral amendments proposed in the 2008 speech -- they may have very little effect on the ground. "You can pass any law you want -- you have a constitutional majority in the Duma," she says. "But what does it mean? Does the country live by the law? Any law can be gotten around."

And, finally, what about Putin? The prime minister, seated in the front row, squirmed though the interminable address, vacillating between annoyance and boredom, and, just a hair too often, rolling his eyes.

But that was all for those of us watching for signs of a split in the so-called tandem, when, in fact, there is none. The two rule together, and Putin rules the two of them. Given this balance of power, this was no coup: Putin must have seen and signed off on the address before his successor delivered it.  "I think it's more of an evolution of Putinism into Putinism Lite," says Alexander Kliment, an analyst with the Eurasia Group. "I don't think of Medvedev as opposition to Putin in any meaningful way. He is simply the more liberal side of Putin's brain." And recent polls indicate that over 80 percent of Russians agree, interpreting Medvedev's first year-and-a-half in office as a continuation of Putin's policies.

Moreover, Medvedev can't implement these reforms alone, even if he has a malleable Duma at his disposal. He needs the elites, and they, carefully distributing their loyalty between the two leaders, would be foolish to jump for Medvedev's ship, given the very real chance that Putin could snatch back the presidency in 2012 -- for 12 more years.

And the member of the elites Medvedev needs most is Putin himself. Next week, Putin will speak at the United Russia congress. What he talks about and any overlaps with Medvedev's November 12 address will be the signals to Russian political players about the government's real agenda. "Medvedev's last word on everything is Putin's," says Kliment. "No one is under any illusions about this, not even Medvedev."

Six years after a civil war that killed 250,000 and displaced hundreds of thousands more, justice is at the top of Liberia's list of needs. But in this small West African country of 3.5 million, the problem isn't a lack of courtrooms or trained lawyers. Liberia is wanting for the actual laws themselves. The country's legal code doesn't exist in print except for a few mismatched volumes here and there, sequestered in incomplete sets in libraries in the capital, Monrovia. And right now, as far as legal advocates can tell, even Liberia's national parliament doesn't have a full copy of the law.

Why not? Because the few volumes that do exist have been quietly copyrighted -- and subsequently held ransom -- by the man in charge of Liberia's legal reform. Across the country, lawyers, courtrooms, and even the government are operating blindly; it's impossible to be certain if they are following a legal code they don't have.

The man who has literally taken the law into his own hands is Philip Banks, appointed by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as chair of the country's law reform commission. He served twice as Liberia's justice minister, first during an interim government in the 1990s and again under Johnson Sirleaf beginning in 2007.

In between his stints as justice minister, Banks led a team of lawyers, a group called the Liberia Law Experts, to codify the country's newest laws. The project, which picked up where an earlier pro bono effort by late Cornell University professor Milton Konvitz had left off, won just over $400,000 in funding from the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), according to e-mail exchanges between Banks and key legal players, obtained by Foreign Policy. Konvitz had codified laws up to 1978, just before Liberia plunged into 20 years of sporadic conflict. Those volumes list the copyright as belonging to the government of Liberia.

Defending himself in an interview with FP on Oct.27, Banks says he numbered, bound, and indexed the newer laws -- intellectual work that he claims as his original property. Without his efforts, he claims, Liberia's laws would exist only in loose-leaf pamphlets and would likely be lost. Banks says the DoJ funding wasn't enough to cover his costs. So when DoJ declined to give him more, he asserted a claim of copyright on the work, according to an explanation of the issue he sent by e-mail to a justice sector consultant in 2006. It's a claim he has appeared willing to relinquish several times for sums between $150,000 and $360,000, according to the e-mail exchanges, which were obtained by FP.

But Banks sees the copyright as an altogether different tool. "These are resources that you've had to expend in putting all of this together, and the question is, should you be compensated? I hold the view that you should," he asserted in his interview with FP. "And for folks that have said, no you shouldn't, I've said to them, go and get your loose-leaf." DoJ, meanwhile, couldn't find records of its agreement with Banks, but a spokesperson says it would be "highly unusual" for the department to have agreed to let Banks retain the copyright.

Banks claimed during the interview that he is willing to give up the copyright for "zero," but that others in his team of Liberian lawyers want more money. Critics in Liberia say Banks is the problem. "There's a lot of blame and name-calling and passing the buck," says Anthony Valcke, a British lawyer working in Liberia on rule-of-law issues.

Either way, the consequences of the dispute are being felt across Liberia, whose courtrooms and parliament are operating without copies of the law. "Look at all the work that's being done in the government, anti-corruption, legal aid, NGOs, all those who work as watchdogs over the acts of the legislation. None of these organizations -- none of them -- have copies of the laws," says Valcke. "It's so fundamental to a democracy that it's unbelievable that this situation has been allowed to exist for so long."

The problem is an open secret in Liberia, where the current justice minister has publicly called the availability of the law a priority, and the minister of labor, who used to work in the Justice Ministry, has often derided the country's lack of access to its own legal code. The U.S. Agency for International Development estimates that $13 million is poured into rule-of-law assistance programs in Liberia each year, even as the law itself is lacking. Several of those programs' personnel have pressed Banks on the issue. When those attempts proved unsuccessful, they've instead worked around his copyright claim. This summer, the United Nations Development Program bought and donated 15 sets of the disputed volumes so that rural county prosecutors could have access to them. Individual volumes from an original run of 100 are scattered across libraries and offices -- or have been lost. No one really knows. Effectively, the volumes are unobtainable.

Banks' group, Liberia Law Experts, is currently negotiating to sell the copyright to the Liberian government. Those involved won't name the asking price, but Varney Sherman, a former presidential candidate who worked on the project with Banks and is party to the negotiations, says the "small fee" is "closer to $100,000" than $360,000. (The entire government's 2007-2008 budget was $207 million, according to the Liberian Finance Ministry.) President Johnson Sirleaf said in an Oct. 12 interview that she is willing to entertain compensation for "whatever they may have spent out of their own resources," but insists, "Rightfully, those copyrights belong to the government." She hopes to have the situation sorted "within a year."

Meanwhile, the dispute slows down legal reform efforts. Judges, law students, and legal scholars make arguments based on old laws, often toting to court 20-year-old tattered law books purchased at a time when you could actually buy law books in Liberia. But a lot has changed in Liberia since those pre-civil war laws were drafted. "We have a lot of laws that are duplicative, that are conflicting, and that has to be sorted out," Johnson Sirleaf acknowledged in her interview with FP.

But sorting out the overlap is difficult to do without access to the law books. In a paper written a year before he became justice minister for the second time, Banks acknowledged that variation in the laws undermined business, development, and human rights in Liberia. The solution? He recommends the government buy the copyright to materials published by "private Liberian initiatives." Banks never acknowledges his financial stake in that recommendation in the 83-page paper, written for the government body that oversees the Law Reform Commission he now chairs.

As the negotiations drag on, the law is disappearing. "We're going to lose legislation, literally," says John Hummel of the Carter Center in Liberia. "When this is all resolved, someone is going to say, 'We passed this one law two years ago about arson; where is it? I don't know.'"

Query Jerusalem residents about their new railway and the most common response is: Don't ask. Then locals will proceed to tell you all about it anyway: a long litany of complaints over the snarled-up roads, broken promises, and urban disasters involved in the ongoing construction of a light railway track through the city. Retailers fume over losses as shopping streets are carved up, shut down, or fenced off while rail tracks are laid at a snail's pace; residents rage at drastically lengthened work commutes; visitors despairingly shred maps as city roads are randomly closed or rerouted.

But the inconvenience is only the start of it: The Israeli rail tracks cross West Jerusalem and go through Palestinian East Jerusalem, which the international community defines as occupied and which is supposed to be the capital of a future Palestinian state. While Israeli officials maintain there's no political angle to the rail line, Palestinian critics see an attempt to unify Jerusalem by laying down infrastructure in occupied territory, against the Geneva Conventions. The dispute over the railway has become a flashpoint for Jerusalem's broader troubles: the increasing house demolitions in Palestinian East Jerusalem, the recent riots in the Old City, and the constant, simmering tension over who rules the holy city, and how, and what gives them the right to, anyway. Even if the construction does one day end, the train's woes may have only just begun.

The Jerusalem Light Rail project -- a public-private initiative -- got started in late 2006. Electric trams will run on a single cross-city route with right of way and traffic priority at all junctions. Tracks are being set down across an 8.7-mile line that runs from Mount Herzl to the west of the city, through the center, past the Old City, into Palestinian villages of East Jerusalem -- Sheikh Jarrah, Shuafat, Beit Hanina -- and ending at the Jewish settlement of Pisgat Ze'ev to the north. An expected 44 trains will make 250,000 yearly trips on the tracks, charging a subsidized fare. There are an intended 24 stops on the line, but so far the only thing to stop has been work on the tracks -- repeatedly. The project has already failed to meet completion deadlines, and a battle focused on whose fault that is -- council or company -- is currently raging in the city courts.

Meanwhile, political pressure  overseas is further gumming up the works. The French company Veolia, which was supposed to run the trains and has a 5 percent stake in the light-rail consortium, has just pulled out after losing major contracts in Europe over its involvement in the Jerusalem train line. A French Palestinian advocacy group got together with the Palestine Liberation Organization and is suing Veolia and another French investor, Alstom, claiming that involvement in the project is a violation of international law -- the case started in late 2007 and is still in court. To top it off, Veolia's planned divestment has sparked another row and is chewing up more court time: The Israeli bus operator Dan, which has no experience with railways, was going to buy out Veolia's shares, but now Israel's other bus operator, Egged, is complaining because it too wants some of the action.

Embattled Israeli officials claim that the rail line has nothing to do with politics, that it's just a long overdue measure to improve public transport services to all Jerusalem residents, Palestinian and Israeli.

But Palestinian campaigners think this is disingenuous. Omar Barghouti, a leading member of the Palestinian boycott-Israel movement, counters that the rail endeavor actually was conceived as a political project and points to the words of former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, who signed off on the train system with this blessing: "I believe that this should be done. ... Anything that can be done to strengthen Jerusalem, construct it, expand it, and sustain it for eternity as the capital of the Jewish people and the united capital of the state of Israel, should be done."

Walid Salem, director of the Centre for Democracy and Community Development in Jerusalem, agrees: "It is a unilateral decision, imposing sovereignty over Jerusalem, without any agreements and in a way that meets only your own [Israeli] interests, not those of your supposed-to-be partners." Salem views the trains as an Israeli attempt to take Jerusalem off the negotiating table.

Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, while tentatively excited by the rail project, worry that they'll be excluded. Light-rail spokesman Shmuel Elgrably says that service architects "don't differentiate between Arabs and Jews for public transport -- in fact the Arab population is more important to us because they use public transport more." Around 35 percent of Jerusalem's population are regular bus-riders; ultra-Orthodox Jews and Palestinians make up the largest component of users, though they don't share the same bus routes.

Elgrably maintains that, all being well, the bullet- and stone-resistant trains will run normally and carry everyone. But Palestinians in Shuafat point out that the stops don't seem located for their convenience. They think that just one incidence of violence could close down the line. For these Jerusalem residents, the prospect that the train's security stipulations will stack against them, just as they do with other forms of public transport, seems to be a given: Palestinians are more often stopped and questioned by security officials at bus and railway stations. And the trains could easily become targets in times of tension; if there are future Arab-Jewish clashes like the ones seen recently in the Old City, violence could spill onto the nearby tramlines.

Residents won't find out how it's all going to work until December 2010, assuming the line meets the most recent deadline for completion. Meanwhile, some of the store keepers on Jerusalem's Jaffa Road are taking bets as to whose grandchildren might actually get to ride on one of those shiny silver trains nestled at a nearby depot, awaiting their day on the tracks.

Two months ago, I was standing in the 100-plus degree heat of Jalalabad, Afghanistan, monitoring an election that gained infamy almost as soon as it began. As an observer for the International Republican Institute (IRI), I witnessed the effects fraud, intimidation, and voter apathy firsthand. And I saw why the runoff election that would have taken place later this month, had it not been cancelled today, would have been no better. Most importantly, I saw the barrage of lessons that Afghanistan and the international community will have to learn before parliamentary and district elections next year if there is any hope for better outcomes.

By now, everyone knows the outcome of August's vote: a competently administered election marred by blatant fraud, followed by an adjudication process that threw out tainted ballots. The result saw front-runner and incumbent, President Hamid Karzai, sink to less than 50 percent of the vote, thereby triggering an upcoming runoff election -- one that everyone hoped would redeem, if only partially, the legitimacy of the election process in Afghan eyes. But yesterday, Karzai's opponent Abdullah Abdullah pulled out of the runoff, saying he couldn't participate in another flawed vote. Now, the second ballot is off altogether. Karzai is back for another term, period.

The elections in Afghanistan mattered, and getting them wrong has had a serious impact. For its policy in Afghanistan to be effective, the United States cannot be seen as condoning -- or worse, complicit in -- a government that is only interested in enriching its members, rather than providing services and improving economic, health, and educational prospects for its citizens. Many in Afghanistan blame the United States for having sat by and watched while the central government skimmed off international funds.

The runoff was an acknowledgment of how badly the United States and its allies need to consolidate Afghan public opinion in favor of a legitimate government and, by extension, NATO troops. Abdullah's withdrawal is a reality check. If the international community is to prevent the same fraud, intimidation, and apathy from marring upcoming parliamentary and local elections -- the kind that matter most, in the everyday sense to Afghans -- there is much work to be done.

A good start would be to look back at how badly things went in August. The IRI delegation of about 29 internationals and 40 Afghans was part of the roughly 300-strong international monitoring effort that covered the country's 28,000 polling stations (only 6,100 of which actually opened on election day). Out of about 31 million Afghans, about 16.5 million were registered to vote, and polling was set to run from 7 a.m to 4 p.m. Our job was to assess whether the elections appeared to be free and fair.

Jalalabad, my team's monitoring location, reportedly has a population of about 300,000, though there hasn't been a census in decades. As with the rest of Afghanistan, the city had no voter list. A senior election official told us after the vote that $100 million was spent to issue registration cards nationwide, but the data obtained was not converted into national or provincial registration lists.

The day before the election, our team went to talk to other "long-term" monitors who had been in town for an average of two weeks. One British woman stated forcefully, "This is my 23rd election observation, and I've never seen one this corrupt." Her Australian colleague told us that he had fraudulently purchased 300 voter registration cards. A French-Canadian working for the Europeans offered bluntly, "It's a mess."

Ahead of the vote, our security detail wouldn't let us meet with the head of the Jalalabad office of the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA), the independent Afghan foundation observing the election, because its offices were located right in the middle of the teeming market area. Instead, we sent our two young male interpreters, recent university graduates. When they asked the local head of FEFA about his expectations for security and fraud on election day, they were told, "I can't say anything about security, but we are 100 percent certain there will be fraud."

So when Aug. 20 rolled around, everyone was certain who would win, despite a surprisingly robust presidential campaign. Karzai had stacked the (nonindependent) Independent Election Commission (IEC) with cronies, and the Taliban threatened to lop off the fingers of those who voted. As the elections neared, the Afghan government became increasingly less interested in the advice of election experts. And by election day, U.N. supervision had dwindled to zero because none of the U.N. personnel were allowed to observe the election in Jalalabad due to security concerns.

That morning, we left our safe house in the middle of Jalalabad and followed our carefully plotted route. Our security forbade us from going out before 10 a.m., three hours after voting began, since most suicide bombings and other attacks are known to take place in the morning, after prayers. The night before, security forces had already discovered 12 improvised explosive devices and disabled them. It was calm, and the streets were fairly empty as we made our way to the first polling station.

We had selected a handful of polling sites, those deemed relatively safe by our security team, but a disproportionate number were female polling centers (men and women vote separately), because our male colleagues were not going to be able to cover those. Each time the drill was the same: I went and interviewed the polling station chairperson, and my partner, Milica Panic, walked around observing the voters, polling the station staff, and the political party observers. I asked about complaints or incidents, the number of ballots received and votes cast so far, whether any police or other security forces had entered (they are prohibited unless requested), and whether other international or domestic observers had visited. I heard about broken hole-punchers, missing voter registration tally sheets, and illiterate and troublemaking candidate observers. When I asked why one polling station was practically devoid of voters, I was told, "Lunch."  But in one male polling station, the chairman put it more honestly: "They aren't coming in the afternoon."

Fear of retaliation by the Taliban kept voters, especially women in conservative areas, away from the polls -- if the centers even opened on election day. Dr. Humayra Haqmal, the chair of the Movement of Afghan Sisters and one of Afghanistan's pre-eminent female organizers, told us that the Taliban came across a man with a voter registration card days before the election and had "put him through a wheat thresher." And since the government failed to throw together a voter list, the voter ID cards had to be supplemented by marking thumbs with purple ink, something that made it easy for the Taliban to pick their victims for retaliation. There were also rumors of deals made by Karzai with insurgents to keep polls off limits to voters in the south to facilitate fraud.

The voter turnout numbers show the painful result. The "Bibi Hawa" female polling center in Jalalabad was stocked with with 14 polling stations and ballots for 8,400 people, only 668 turned up to vote, a turnout just above one-fourteenth of the expected number. The average turnout across the city of Jalalabad for women appeared to be around 20 percent. Our colleagues estimated that it was about 25 to 30 percent for males. Nationwide, turnout was about 38 percent for men and less than 30 percent for women.

Security was equally dismal. The election security plan involved three security cordons, with NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) providing "area security" on the ground and in the air, the Afghan National Army responsible for security around urban centers, and the national police providing security inside cities and towns. These measures, while successful in terms of keeping the level of incidents low, were ineffective at guaranteeing the security of potential voters. It is unclear exactly why ISAF was not deployed in some especially problematic areas.

In August, the hands-off international approach resulted in a flawed process, susceptible to intimidation and fraud. For the next election, a voter list must be cobbled together, and the United Nations needs to provide hands-on supervision all the way to election day. The security plan will be critical, too. It probably makes sense to consolidate voting in far fewer polling centers and to provide secure transportation to and from those centers. It might still be dangerous for voters to board a bus, but there is greater safety in numbers.

Almost everything about the Afghan presidential election has been a mess, right down to the final outcome, today, of granting Hamid Karzai another term. There's only one silver lining: The mess should be a wake-up call to the international community about how rotten the Afghan political system has become. If we're lucky, it may just galvanize the United Nations, NATO, and all of the governments to plan better for the next round of voting. It would be the only positive outcome of this dreadful election.

Pakistan is once again on the receiving end of violence and militant intimidation. Wednesday's attacks were among the country's deadliest. A car bomb tore through a crowded market full of women's clothing shops and general market stalls in Peshawar, killing 95 people. The explosion came about three hours after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Islamabad, just 100 miles away.

Tensions have soared across Pakistan following a spike in Taliban-mediated violence killing more than 240 people this month alone. Peshawar, a gateway to the northwest tribal belt where the Pakistani Army is on a major offensive against Taliban militants, is a perpetual target for violence. But now, as the line between military and civilian targets blurs, the bloodshed has shaken even the most resilient Pakistanis. It has shattered any illusion that the Pakistani army is successfully quashing the Taliban. And if Wednesday's strikes tell us anything, it is that there is much more violence to come. Pakistan is at war, and civilians are no longer immune.

The recent string of bloody attacks began on October 12, when a suicide car bombing targeting Pakistani troops killed 41 people in a market in northwest Shangla district, a Pashto-speaking area in the Swat Valley. The Pakistani army claimed it had retaken the area from militants, but the bombing proved otherwise. Two weeks later, a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a U.N. aid agency in Islamabad, killing five staffers. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack and warned of more violence unless the army ended its current offensive in the tribal areas of South Waziristan. It made good on its promise on October 10 when militants raided the army headquarters in the city of Rawalpindi. Military spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said during a press conference in Rawalpindi that the attacks were meant to force the government to "reconsider its decision to go after the Taliban in their heartland on the Afghan border."

Now, the Taliban are threatening to unleash an even grander assault. "The more Taliban feel hemmed in by the Pakistani military presence around South Waziristan, where the Taliban has strongholds, the more they fight back like cornered animals," explains Haroon Rashid of BBC Urdu.

What the attackers are after is alarmingly clear: to terrorize the Pakistani state and people into submission. "The militants want to destabilize the government and intimidate the public," Mehmood Shah, a retired brigadier and defense analyst based in Peshawar, told GEO news network. The war is no longer just between security forces and the militants. Common citizens are directly involved now. 

The attacks have certainly succeeded in instilling fear. "When people leave their homes in the morning they fear for their lives," Taj Javed, a freelance journalist, told me. "People are very scared and you can easily see it; there are fewer people on the streets. When I see security forces, I feel there will be soon another attack. We are sick and tired of the attacks."

Like Javed, many fear that things will get worse, not better. "There are going to be more bomb explosions and suicide attacks. Our livelihoods and the future of our generation are at stake," said Minhaj Hasan, a consultant in Lahore, in an interview. "I am scared ... that I might see the end of Pakistan in my lifetime." Another concerned businessman,  Mohammad Rafique, believes that "the army needs to realize that there is a great challenge ahead. They thought that they had broken the back of the militants in Swat. But the very fact that the [most recent] attack happened a day after the attack on the army headquarters means that the militants are very much together and well organized."

It's a big change from a month ago, when there was a hint of optimism in the war against Taliban. Then, the Pakistan army claimed to have routed the Taliban from the Swat Valley. A drone attack in the Waziristan area, the Taliban's stronghold, had killed the Pakistani Taliban's chief and U.S. and Pakistani intelligence officials said that his successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, was killed in a duel to replace him.

Unfortunately, the spate of grisly attacks during the past week has proven that Hakimullah Mehsud is very much alive and so is the Taliban -- with renewed confidence and vengeance to boot. Analysts think that the new Taliban leadership is keen to demonstrate its strength with fresh, dramatic strikes.

Pakistani military officials have said that they would not be deterred by the insurgents' new show of force. Maj. Gen. Abbas said in the Rawalpindi conference that "the South Waziristan offensive will proceed whenever the army decides to launch it."

For Pakistan's government, this is the real test. So far, the military has largely failed in its campaign against the militants. "[T]he history of Pakistan's fight against militancy is a case study in missed opportunities and warning signs ignored until the damage is already caused," Musadiq Sanwal, the editor of Dawn Newspaper, recently wrote.

The militants have taken advantage of this -- as well as their knowledge that the state cannot afford a prolonged operation with winter just around the corner. The Pakistan Army is planning a major offensive in South Waziristan, the Taliban's stronghold. All eyes will be on the battle front. Increasingly, that includes all of Pakistan.

A few weeks ago, I visited the home of Maksharip Aushev -- the 43-year-old scion of a wealthy and politically influential family in Ingushetia -- on the night of his youngest son's wedding. It was a festive occasion despite the unrest in Russia's volatile North Caucasus, and hundreds of relatives and friends danced in the courtyard of the brick mansion in Nazran. But Aushev, a cousin of the former Ingush president, Ruslan Aushev, did not join in. He felt more like talking to reporters about the epidemic of violence in his republic.

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His eyes were dark and his face serious as he described the abductions of his nephew and son two years ago. Aushev, a millionaire nicknamed the "Marble Magnate," devoted his money and connections to raising protests throughout Ingushetia. He hoped to spur the regional president at the time, Murat Zyazikov, to do everything he could to save his son from the separatist insurgents. "My son was rescued from a secret jail in Chechnya," Aushev told us. "I decided I would lead the opposition and help relatives of all the other victims in the republic."

As the wedding continued into the night, young men began to shoot Kalashnikovs into the sky in celebration. Aushev continued to speak to us, blaming the federal security service and police for committing some of the abductions and murders. He complained that the local president, "no matter how much we all like him," did not have any power over the "bandits." Plus, he feared, corrupt bureaucrats had been paying the insurgents protection money, eroding any semblance of civil order in Ingushetia.

Later that night, Aushev walked out to the balcony to watch fireworks. Sad and quiet, wearing a traditional Ingush black wool top hat, he stared into the distance without smiling. "The rebel leaders charm the hearts of all young people in the republic," he said. The Kremlin couldn't possibly counter them.

Last Sunday morning, Aushev was shot dead while driving his car.

Aushev is the third person I've interviewed in the past two years gunned down in cold blood in Ingushetia or one of its neighboring provinces, Dagestan and Chechnya. All three regions are mostly Muslim, highly politically unstable, and lie near Russia's southern border with Georgia. Violence is endemic, I know too well. In July, for instance, thugs dragged Natalya Estemirova, an indomitable human rights activist, and a dear friend of mine, into a van. She was later found riddled with bullets.

Whether anyone admits it, Ingushetia is a war zone. In Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Chechnya, each a semi-autonomous area, radical separatists seek to destabilize the region. They commit kidnappings, murders, summary executions, and bombings in spite of crackdowns and arrests. They fight against Russian police and state forces, or, at least, the ones they haven't infiltrated and corrupted.

In Ingushetia, the Kremlin has responded by appointing regional governors and sending police and military reinforcements. (It's arguably worse in Chechnya, where the Kremlin sent in troops in the 1990s that only left this year.) In 2002, Moscow appointed Zyazikov, whose brutal crackdowns sometimes seemed worse than the violence he hoped to stem. Unrest escalated, and last fall, President Dmitry Medvedev named Yunus-Bek Yevkurov president of the region instead.

This appointment pleased Aushev. At the time, he had taken over the management of the opposition Web site, ingushetia.org, after the loss of his partner, Magomed Yevloyev -- who died from an "accidental" wound to the head, according to official state publications, received while being driven in a police car after his arrest.

But seeing that the Kremlin was at least attempting to stop the escalating violence between the state and the insurgents -- violence whose perpetrators seemed less and less easy to tell apart -- Aushev slowed down his opposition activity. He hoped that Yevkurov's lighter hand would help slow down the killings and abductions. Aushev also took a job as a human rights representative for the Kremlin.

Still, the secret war metastasized. Yevkurov did nothing to stop it. Bloody reports from Ingushetia, Dagestan and Chechnya continued to flood news wires. At one point, Russia was losing more police officers and soldiers in these regions than the United States was losing troops in Iraq. Then, in June, Yevkurov nearly died in an assassination attempt. Soon after, a suicide bomber rammed a van into a five-story police station in the Ingush capital of Nazran, killing 20 and injuring 138 more. Insurgents killed a judge and a former prime minister as well.

The law forces meant to stop this violence resorted to more bloody tactics in response. Medvedev continued to hold that government was making process towards peace, a risible assertion. Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the head of Moscow's Helsinki Group, feared that escalation might spur regional outbreaks of fighting. "People stand against the state measures, as they see no signs of authorities improving their methods. People are killed and kidnapped. Our leaders do not like to admit their mistakes," Alexeyeva told me. "All they say is that things are beautiful in Russia -- by their blind management they push these burning problems into the corner. They risk that the problems will be out of control."

All the while, young people in Ingushetia continued to join the insurgency, the best source of jobs in the region. Magomed Mutsolgov, the head of human-rights group Mashr, which is headquartered in Karbulak, Ingushetia, agrees. "People are pushed into a corner. Their friends, relatives and opposition leaders are abducted or killed. Many join the insurgency, as they see no alternative," he told us, sitting in his office, which is lined with portrait photographs of the missing.

He notes that 175 people have been kidnapped or disappeared in the region since 2002. Mutsolgov himself has been threatened multiple times; once, he was nearly gunned down outside of his house: "By killing us they would not mute people, as there are hundreds of relatives willing to pay revenge for their loved ones," he said, hopefully.

And so, the violence in Ingushetia escalates -- and nobody in Moscow wants to do anything about it. Aushev, at least, believed as much. The day before his murder, the famed opposition leader and millionaire appeared in a documentary on television. While he steered his car, he noted, "Both corrupt bureaucrats and insurgents have the same goal in Ingushetia today: To sabotage president Yevkurov."

The next day, he died.

Thousands of local people came to his house to pay respects. The opposition leader, Magomed Khazbiyev spoke at the ceremony. "They kill you here for defending human rights. They kill you here for opposition activity," he later told me over the phone. "The blame lies on the government, law enforcement, and President Yevkurov, the government of this country, and its bandit methods.

"The people give the government a week to find the killers of their hero. If the president does not keep his word, a civil war will start in the republic, as that was the last drop of our patience."

As Ahmed, my brother-in-law, limped out of the Islamabad Airport Thursday evening, his appearance alone was enough to relay the ordeal he had endured just one day earlier in Kabul. His ears and hands were burned, his cheeks bruised. The usually care-free Ahmed had escaped death twice during the two-hour gun-battle between the three Taliban suicide bombers and security forces early Wednesday morning. From a nearby window, Ahmed watched as the attackers mowed down no fewer than eight people including five foreign U.N. staff. Then, as he made his escape from the building, Ahmed found himself caught in a rain of deadly shrapnel after one of the attackers blew himself up.

Only minutes earlier, Ahmed had locked himself in his room, despite pleas from two other residents to run for his life. But within minutes, the room caught fire, and he exited the rear of the house for safety, with no way of knowing that he was jumping from the pan into the fire. Mistaking him for a militant accomplice, Afghan police began to chase him, shooting their guns at him. He survived the gunfire but officers managed to catch up, pouncing upon him like starving dogs, and bundled him off to one of the intelligence facilities.

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Ahmed, distraught, has been rendered nearly mute from this traumatic experience. For now, he refuses to divulge what happened to him during the few hours he spent under interrogation, but his bruised and swollen face says it all. Luckily for our family, one of Ahmed's colleagues saw him being grabbed by Afghan security officials. This eyewitness account helped his employers locate and win him freedom by verifying his identity after hours of being held. Sensing imminent death, Ahmed had made frantic calls while he was locked in that room to my sister telling her that he was trapped and that she should take care of their three kids. He also phoned his brothers in Peshawar, telling them that his time was up and asked for forgiveness "If I ever offended you." But soon after his cell phone connection was lost and the entire family here in Pakistan had almost given up hope until his employers called to say that they had retrieved him from interrogation and he was OK. This information came roughly five hours after he made his last call. He is now resting at home.  

October 28 turned out to be an equally gory day for hundreds of people of my birth place -- Peshawar. Only about two weeks after killing approximately 50 innocent citizens at the city center, terrorists targeted yet another market, crowded with women and children, with at least 150 kg of lethal explosives laden on a car; the carnage left over 100 dead, mostly women and children. Two of my close relatives barely survived the fatal attack and lost their shops and all the merchandise within. In another attack on a bus stop at the crowded Soekarno Square two weeks earlier, my cousin's mother-in-law suffered injuries.  

It was a day both of great personal gratitude and of immense grief; gratitude because my brother-in-law returned from Kabul in one piece, albeit shaken and horror-struck. Grief because the ugly minds and hands behind his ordeal -- and behind the two deadly Peshawar attacks on women and children -- make no distinction between innocent civilians and the ones hunting them -- military security forces.

It is very likely that the attacks in Kabul and Peshawar -- occurring within three hours of each other -- were timed with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to the Pakistani capital.

In response to the attacks in Kabul, Clinton struck a defiant note, issuing a statement condemning the terrorists, calling them "cowardly."

Such defiant and rhetorical statements by U.S. and Pakistani leaders alike notwithstanding, the bitter reality stalking the roads in Peshawar and elsewhere in northwestern Pakistan, denotes the growing menace of ideologically-driven terrorists who use the name of Islam to wreak death and destruction.

So far this year, terrorists have carried out dozens of suicide attacks, and acts of terror that have killed and maimed hundreds of Pakistanis. In October alone, faceless terrorists have struck at least 10 different locations in northwestern Pakistan.

The pain and trauma these attacks are inflicting on people at large is immense. The socio-psychological impact of the terror campaign -- ostensibly conducted by the al Qaeda-inspired Tehreeke Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and fuelled by speculation of other external factors gunning for Pakistan's mighty military establishment -- is one of insecurity and uncertainty, the underlying current which constitutes an essential part of the terrorists' agenda; create panic thereby destabilizing the country.

While people at large feel helpless, Pakistan's civilian state institutions have yet to match their response to the alarming level of threat. The army continues its push against terrorist stronghold in South Waziristan, but the government lacks trust and authority among the people. It has yet to devise a counter-terror strategy that reinstates public confidence in state institutions.