Summary: “The enemy has started a guerrilla war,” Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik said after teams of gunmen launched coordinated attacks on three law enforcement facilities in Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore and car bombs hit two other cities, killing 39 people in an escalating wave of anti-government violence. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on the 36th day after losing his 2008 primary challenge against U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann in Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District, Aubrey Immelman reported that the Afghan insurgency had spread beyond traditional Taliban strongholds, with the number of attacks in the country at a six-year high, and recommended Peter Galbraith’s book “Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America’s Enemies.”

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Summary: There are indications Afghanistan could become the theater for a proxy war between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on the 29th day after losing his 2008 primary challenge against U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann in Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District, Aubrey Immelman, in line with his focus on national security, republished an Oct. 8, 2002 open letter by Michael Livingston outlining why the invasion of Iraq would be a mistake on both rational and moral grounds.

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Summary: The new leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud, threatened to strike back at Pakistan and the United States for airstrikes by unmanned U.S. drones in northwestern Pakistan. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on the 26th day after losing his 2008 primary challenge against U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann in Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District, Aubrey Immelman, in line with his focus on national security, reported that the senior British commander in Afghanistan had said that a decisive military victory in Afghanistan was impossible and that the objective in Afghanistan should be to achieve a manageable level of insurgency that’s not a strategic threat. He also reported on a U.S. missile strike in Pakistan and ongoing violence in Iraq.

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Summary: A spate of bombings in Iraq raises concern that militants are regrouping after suffering sharp setbacks in fighting during the previous two years, 2007-2008.

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Summary: Taliban militants have extended their grip in northwestern Pakistan, pushing out from the Swat Valley where the government has agreed to impose Islamic law and patrolling villages as close as 60 miles from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.

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Summary: About 150 militants armed with rockets and automatic weapons attacked a transport terminal in northwestern Pakistan along a key supply route used by U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

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Summary: The al-Qaida-linked terror network, Jaish-e-Mohammed, runs schools for jihadi fighters in the heart of Pakistan, hundreds of miles from the Afghan border, amid reports that insurgent commanders and suicide bombers in the AfPak border region are increasingly coming from Punjab. … A suicide bomber struck a tent filled with Kurdish funeral mourners, unleashing a huge fireball that killed 25 people in the northern Iraq town of Jalawla, where Kurds and Arabs are competing for power.

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Summary: The message from Washington to Pakistan is clear: There is no change in U.S. policy when it comes to going after al-Qaida and Taliban targets in Pakistan’s lawless border areas. After all, Barack Obama warned during his presidential campaign that America must go after terrorist targets if Pakistan did not act first.

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Summary: Security forces used tear gas and batons to repel anti-Israel protesters who tried to attack a U.S. consulate in Pakistan as tens of thousands of people demonstrated worldwide against Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip. … Seven years after a U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan routed the Taliban regime, hard-line Islamic fighters who had scattered under massive bombardment to their villages and rear bases in Pakistan once again govern large swaths of Afghanistan and are dug in across regions that surround the capital Kabul, saying they welcome the U.S. military’s proposal to send as many as 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan by summer 2009 because it will give them more chances to kill “infidels.”

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Summary: The Taliban has long operated its own shadow government in the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan, but its power is now spreading north to the doorstep of Kabul. More than seven years after the U.S.-led invasion, the Islamic militia is attempting to reconstitute the government by which it ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s. … Grim statistic: 2008 has been the deadliest year yet for NATO soldiers in Afghanistan. … At least 22 people were killed and 50 wounded after a bomb tore through a busy square in a Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad.

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