That it's WW II once agin, and it didn't just start with 9/11. We had better get serious about fighting it.

Hitler might have won that one, or fought the world to a draw. He had the power of the world's second most potent military machine at his beck and call. He was able to start a war that killed 54 million people, and drive the Jews of Europe towards extinction. The Taliban shitheads and all their allies can't come close to that.

As someone who thinks Sharia law is oppressive nonsense and that the Pakistani government is obliged to fight it (it's their country and their people and their fight, not ours) I am all in favor of reminding people how lousy things are in large swaths of the Muslim world (including most of Afghanistan, a country we supposedly "liberated" ho-ho), but just as Christians had to stop massacring each other and buring witches at the stake after 1648, Muslims will have to stumble towards modernity at their own pace and in their own way. I'd say if we told Pakistani Intelligence and the pakistani military that we were cutting off all their military aid and monitoring their other aid and loans like hawks if they didn't push back against this nastiness, they'd get off their duffs and suppress these throwbacks.

In Sharia, a thief, will, after several offenses, sometimes have his hands cut off.

In America you put him in prison for 20 years, cut off from everything.

I can see this war getting bigger in Pakistan. India will have to invade to keep the crazy religious scumbags at bay. The Pakistanis are hopeless and lousy at fighting battles against a bunch of criminals. I really feel sorry for women there. To have to lose all your rights to be in the street or to study to the likes of common criminals and peasants with no education.

This will play out like the Iraqis under Saaddam fighting against the Iranian Islamists. With war flaming all over the scene.

This is the a eastern battle and not our in the USA. Let them fight it out. Maybe just blast them from a distance.

Thinking that this is a “local issue” is the same thinking that early Nazism was a German problem. Apart from encouraging Islamic extremists in other countries, the Swat Valley maniacs will eventually turn to more ambitious ways of demonstrating their hatred of mankind, perhaps by exporting the main product of their little empire – terror.

Have Americans forgotten that 9/11 was conceived and executed by this bunch of bearded ragheads ?

This is NOT a local problem.

It is freakin' scary that we have been made to think that Iraq was the "main" problem.

God help America with this level of ignorance.

We need to exterminate the Taliban if it means bringing back the draft..

That article quite literally filled me with horror. Just imagine listening to those dingbats on the radio each morning to find out how many of your friends and family have been sentenced to die ...horribly.

Religion requires one to suspend reason. Once that is done it's amazing how easily legions of people can be convinced that slaughtering other people is a wonderful idea.

The disputed region between India and Pakistan has made it in the Pakistani Military's best interest to keep these insane buggers around. Religion may not be the cause of the dispute but it sure keeps it alive. Sorting out that dispute would do much towards killing off the Taliban.

Locally. Thanks to that dispute I'm surrounded by Punjabi, Muslims and Siks here in my little town of El Sobrante. The Siks at least are nicer than the local baptists.

it's that Pakistan is the Taliban. The Taliban only exist because the government of Pakistan -- civilian, military, intelligence -- created it in the 1990s and continue to nurture it in order to control Afghanistan and gain "strategic depth" in its maniacal effort to destroy India. Only a fool would expect Pakistan to fight against the Taliban.

If Obama is serious about tackling the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan, he needs to actively work with his South Asia envoy Richard Holbrooke to resolve the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan. As long as the Pakistani military (the real power in Pakistan, not the sham Zardari-led civilian government) fears India's take-over of Azad Kashmir and other territory, it will continue to tacitly support the Taliban as a counter-force to Indian influence in Afghanistan.

If the U.S. can help Kashmir with its self-determination (a UN resolution that India keeps from being implemented) and finally resolve whether it remains a part of India, of Pakistan, or an independent country, then there might be a lasting peace between the two S. Asian nuclear powers.

Most Pakistanis despise the backward, ignorant Taliban fanaticism. But since there's no real democracy, they're impotent to do anything when guns speak louder than votes. Obama would be severely wrong-headed to think a military solution will get rid of the Taliban. He needs to empower the moderate Pakistanis and work through educational aid, financial aid to NGOs and not the military, and by cultivating leadership among the respected secular and religiously liberal circles in Pakistan. Bombing people to death (and killing scores of innocent civlians in the process) will only serve as a recruiting tool for more Taliban soldiers.

This is how it will be.

Within the next two years, there will be one, two, three, maybe four nuclear explosions.

They will happen somewhere in Pakistan.

Conditions have already reached a point for a nuclear episode there in the near future. Here they are in no particular order:

1. The Taliban are 100 miles from Islamabad. For those who missed school the day they passed out the geography plugins, Islamabad is the capital of Pakistan. The Taliban being 100 miles away? Like from San Diego to Los Angeles.

2. The USA is distracted. The USA is the only country in the world with the capability of moving 25,000 troops (with their armor and equipment, including tactical nukes) from Point A to Point B anywhere in the world within 24 hours. But right now (and for several years to come), the USA is hobbled by its economic crisis.

3. India, because of the Mumbai incident last Christmas, is watching events in Pakistan with one finger on the button.

4. China, because of its restless Uighur Muslim minority, is watching events in Pakistan with deep concern.

5. Iran is feverishly working to complete its nuclear program. Many people think it's doing so becaue of the US threat. In reality, the Iranian nightmare is the Taliban with nukes.

So the Taliban are 100 miles from paydirt. I think any day now, it's "On to Islamabad!" It should be easy. The Pakistani government is riddled with cowards and Taliban sympathizers. If the Taliban takes the capital, we will have nuclear war in South Asia.