US troops to operate on the ground in Pakistan

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U.S. officials still don't know exactly how a suicide bomber managed to get in without being searched, killing even CIA agents including the base commander.

...

Taliban sources tell CBS News the notorious Haqqani network was behind the attack, using Afghan operatives with the help from colleagues in Pakistan.

The Haqqani group covers both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, reports CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier.

...

U.S. commanders say they've been stepping up attacks against the Haqqanis, sending an extra 1,000 special ops forces across Afghanistan over the past year. Another 500 are due this spring. A senior U.S. official says the Pakistani government has also agreed to allow small numbers of U.S. special ops forces to operate on the ground in the Haqqani's Pakistan stronghold.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/01/01/...shtml?tag=stack

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Two things here -

1. Kim Dozier is HARD CORE!!!! She's a reporter that took shrapnel to the head from a roadside bomb in Iraq - and is back at it again! She's reporting from the relative "safety" of Washington, D.C. now, but she's still trying to get the story out - kinda sounds more deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize than someone else I know....

2. This is how war over there works. CIA and spec ops have to build a human intelligence network - sometimes that's going to go badly. When you're trying to establish contacts of trust, they may swing the other way. It happens. We hear about this on the news and think "oh wow. They snuck in and blew up seven guys." Well, we use those contacts to determine whereabouts of their guys so we can drop a million dollar bomb off a million dollar unmanned plane and blow them up. This story should not be as shocking as what it seems.

What should be shocking here (and I guess this makes three things now) is we're still trying to eliminate the command and control of Al-Qaida and Taliban almost 10 years on. If people paid half as much attention to that fact as they do to the American Idol results, they'd realize we're pretty much where we were back in Oct. of 2001. That's shocking.