Whatever good this week's visit by Senator John Kerry had done to soothe U.S.-Pakistan tensions was complicated by Tuesday's firefight between Pakistani troops and a NATO helicopter that had crossed into the country from Afghanistan. During his meeting with Pakistan's top civilian leaders, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman and White House confidante Kerry was critical about the anti-American environment cultivated in Pakistan in the wake of the operation to kill Osama Bin Laden. After a couple days of ...

The head of Pakistan's powerful Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence offered his resignation to the country's prime minister on Friday as he sought to defend the role of the spy agency. Lieut. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the ISI chief, conceded that Osama bin Laden's presence in Pakistan had been an "intelligence failure" and that he was prepared to step down and submit himself to any scrutiny, parliamentarians from both government and opposition parties told TIME on condition ...

When the U.S. confronted Pakistan after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, there were no discussions of common goals and shared dreams. There was just a very direct threat: you're either with us or against us. Pakistan had to choose between making an enemy of the U.S. and taking a quick and dirty deal sweetened with the promise of a lot of cash. In the end, Pakistan's cooperation was a transaction that satisfied the urgent needs ...

Stepping up the attackSometimes it seems that success fathers its own problems. In its campaign to hook smuggled drugs, the Reagan Administration has claimed some impressive catches: since establishing a regional interdiction center in South Florida in March 1982, it says that cocaine and marijuana seizures there are up 54% and 23% respectively, drug arrests have risen by 27%, and the street value of intercepted dope amounts to around $5 billion. Smugglers, however, have risen to the challenge by trafficking in smaller, harder-to-detect loads and by moving ...

With the announcement of national elections on July 3, Thailand's Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has placed his fate in the hands of the voters, and put the country's developing democracy to what may prove to be a perilous test. At 8 a.m. Tuesday morning, parliament was officially dissolved after 30 months under Abhisit which were marked by bloody protests, economic crisis and deepening social and political polarization. The elections will be Thailand's second since a bloodless military ...

Last Monday, the Navy was the hero across America, for the exploits of its SEALs in bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. This Monday, the sea service was zero in certain quarters for saying it will permit same-sex marriages within its hallowed chapels. It marks the first of what is likely to be many thunderclaps associated with the lifting of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" ban on openly gay men and women serving in the U.S. military. Navy ...

In a secure vault in the U.S. Army's super-secret Intelligence and Security Command in northern Virginia, Colonel Mike Tanksley sketches the barest outlines of the new Armageddons. These are only "What ifs?" he insists, so there cannot really be details. Yet his war scenario resounds with almost biblical force. The next time a tyrant out of some modern Babylon threatens an American ally the U.S. doesn't immediately send legions of soldiers or fleets of warships. Instead Washington visits ...

Wars look better after 40 years, when the old men who were soldiers forget how frightened they were. Perhaps it is merely that survival itself takes on a golden haze: we were being shot at, but we were young, and the bullets missed. Even so, it seems strange that anyone would look back fondly at time spent as prisoner or guard in a military prison. "Why would they do this for us?" wondered Gerhardt Clauss, 61, a former German infantryman ...

The four helicopters chuffed urgently through the Khyber Pass, racing over the lights of Peshawar and down toward the quiet city of Abbottabad and the prosperous neighborhood of Bilal Town. In the dark houses below slept doctors, lawyers, retired military officers — and perhaps Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted fugitive. Half a world away, it was Sunday afternoon in the crowded White House Situation Room. President Barack Obama was stone-faced as he followed the ...

When President Asif Ali Zardari's phone rang at 1.15 a.m. on Monday, it was President Barack Obama on the line, with news that a U.S. operation to eliminate Osama bin Laden and retrieve his body had been successful. That phone call, Pakistani officials tell TIME, was the first that their government heard about a U.S. military operation conducted just three hours' drive from Islamabad. There was no mistaking the obvious mistrust from Washington in the timing: Pakistan's ...