Afghan police not up to the job in Marjah. The poor performance of an elite cadre of officers deployed to Marjah has cast doubt on the Afghan police's ability to maintain order in Afghanistan once U.S. troops leave the country. Officers routinely abandon their posts for hours on end, refuse to work at night, and set up unofficial checkpoints to shake down passersby for cash or cell phones. To make matters worse, many of the police deployed to Marjah are Tajik speakers, even though Marjah's residents speak Pashtu, making it almost impossible for them to connect with locals. [NYT]
UN official calls for end to CIA drone strikes in Pakistan. Philip Alston, the UN's special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, said that the CIA's refusal to disclose its criteria for selecting targets and the precautions it takes to prevent civilian casualties makes it impossible to determine whether some of these attacks constituted war crimes. Alston said the US should end the program, but did not say whether or not he considered the program illegal. [Washington Post]
Karzai peace plan doesn't address root causes of insurgency. Instead of just offering insurgents economic incentives to support the Afghan government, Kabul should address militants' legitimate grievances against the Karzai government, say Caroline Wadhams and Colin Cookman of the Center for American Progress. Job offers and handouts, which form the centerpiece of the peace plan under consideration at this week's peace conference, have already been tried - and failed - several times since the Taliban fell in 2001. [Center for American Progress]
Peace conference doesn't represent Afghan people. This morning's insurgent attack just outside the conference site isn't the only thing wrong with Karzai's peace summit. Because the Afghan president has stacked the conference with his own supporters, the concerns of opposition and women's rights groups will go unheeded, says Thomas Ruttig, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network. As a result, the conference will produce a "pseudo-consensus" around giving up women's and human rights in exchange for peace with the Taliban. [Foreign Policy]
Pakistan declares victory in northern province. Islamabad announced it had driven insurgents out of Orakzai Agency, one day after it killed 18 militants and injured six in an airstrike that targeted the insurgents' reported hideout in upper Orakzai. The Pakistan army says the 200,000 people believed to have been displaced by the operation may now return home. But they have reason to doubt this claim; Pakistan has declared victory in other districts in the past, only to see insurgents re-emerge soon after. [DAWN]
VIDEO: Members of the U.S. Army's 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment on their fight in Afghanistan. The regiment was one of the hardest hit by insurgent attacks, losing 22 of its 800 troops in a yearlong tour ending this summer. [AP]