While virtually hopping through the BBC South Asian page, this little Khargosh came across the following articles that left me... well... twitching my nose in puzzlement. 

Article #1 claims that Nato (which, in this article, is used interchangeably with the word "West") is "concerned" about Afghanistan.  Reading between the lines, though, it appears that Nato is actually "concerned" about Pakistan - not the country, so much as its policy:

The US and other Western countries have also expressed concern about the deals with militants near the Afghan border.

The west is worried that if such agreements lead to the wholesale withdrawal of the Pakistani military from the tribal areas, militants will have even more freedom to slip across the border into Afghanistan.

Not to be upstaged by Nato, our own Chertoff makes clear in Article #2 that the US is not afraid to "push back" al-Qaeda in South Asia the way they've pushed back al-Qaeda in Iraq.  However, they seem less concerned with military maneuvers than with infiltration of the civilian kind.

He warned that militants in Pakistan were training recruits who could mix inconspicuously in Western society.

In fact, he's so worried about terrorist chameleons that it comes up again in an article that requires barely half-an-additional-scroll to finish:

"They are looking for people who can operate freely and inconspicuously in Western society."

Seriously, though.  Do you think any terrorist organization trains its people to stick out?  The CIA certainly didn't train it's former "client," Osama Bin Laden, to stick out (although I guess he didn't learn that lesson so well, did he?).  But besides the silliness of this statement (and silliness is something I've gotten used to in regards to the US government since the tragedy of 2000), more troubling to me is the implication that there are some people that must be trained to be "inconspicuous" in Western society, and that these people are (more and more these days) brown.  Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but shouldn't Chertoff be more concerned with border security, like Nato is, than Pakistanis "sticking out"?  And is the default state of brown / Muslim / Middle Eastern / South Asian people conspicuous?

Chertoff's continuation is equally troubling:

"[Al-Qaeda] are using their platform in the frontier areas of Pakistan to train operatives, including operatives who don't fit what perhaps the public believes is the normal profile of a terrorist,"... 

What does the public believe is the normal profile of a terrorist?  Is Chertoff pretty much admitting to profiling here, or is it just me?

There is a good chance I am oversensitive to this, since people like, oh, my little brother and my dad have both been harassed since the days of 9-11, even though they're both peace-loving-hippy-fools who yell at me when I squash bugs on the sidewalk (not terrorist material, let me tell you, despite their brown skin and facial hair).  It just seems like the subtext here assumes that we all have an idea of what a terrorist looks like, and that a terrorists' ability to challenge that idea is the key to taking our country down while we're unawares.  Frankly, if you ask me (which Chertoff didn't), the best way to fix this country is to pump more money into the public school system instead of pointless programs designed to protect us from imaginary enemies, but what do I know?

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this article for me, though, is that I'm still confused about the whole situation with the Afghani border.  What kind of deal is Pakistan striking, exactly?  What does this mean for Afghanistan, and for us?  And does Pakistan's new government (which the article generously calls democratic) actually have a plan for addressing Islamic militants?  Can a Khargosh get a conversation about the issues that doesn't involve perpetuating a climate of fear?