by Dave McGill

Three of our soldiers were killed 100 miles inside Pakistan last week, according to the Department of Defense. All told, the Pentagon released the obituaries of 11 military personnel that lost their lives in the Afghanistan theater of operations, ranging in age from 19 to 39. Seven of the deaths were caused by improvised explosive devices.

The three Pakistan deaths were reported to have occured in Timagara, and there was no further official comment as to why our troops were in that country. Timagara is located in the Lower Dir District, North-West Frontier Province, about 100 miles from the Afghanistan border.

The Pakistan media has previously reported that the Taliban has been attempting to take over the Timagara area and impose its own version of Sharia law there. Otherwise, it does not appear to be a particularly strategic location. The population is said to be largely composed of women due to the lack of employment there. The economy survives mainly on the money sent back to the residents by those who have left.

The three soldiers were attached to an airborne unit and they were killed by a roadside bomb. Two of them were described as being civil affairs specialists and one was in psychological operations.

Total U.S. deaths in the Afghanistan campaign now stand at 984, according to the website icasualties.org., while the toll in Iraq remains at 4,375.

Meanwhile, the situation in Iraq is heating up. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is no longer the puppet we selected. Instead, he has become a strong-arm leader seemingly intent on fomenting a civil conflict.

Middle East analyst, Tom Ricks, recently told Wolf Blitzer, during a segment of the “Situation Room,” that there is a 50% chance Iraq will erupt and a !0%-15% chance that the civil uprising will become regional in nature.

This comes at a time when trouble between the Sunni and Shiite factions appears to be coming to a boil. Iraq has experienced 11 suicide bombings in the past 11 days, including four on Friday, causing increased concern that the Sunni Arab insurgency is regrouping. One of the Friday attacks, a double bombing in the southern city of Karbala, killed at least 43 Shiites and wounded more than 150 others. On the same day, a similar twin bombing in Karachi, Pakistan, took the lives of 22 Shiites and wounded another 50 to 100.

Many believe that the crux of the problem in Iraq is the unfair treatment that the Sunnis feel they have received.

Some may have forgotten and others may prefer not to remember, but the fact of the matter is that the Sunnis played a vital role as conditions in Iraq improved during 2007. At that time, the United States military recruited and armed approximately 100,000 of them to go after Al Qaeda groups. Known as the “Sons of Iraq,” they were reported to be effective in conducting their dangerous missions under the protection of our military.

There came a time, however, when their services were no longer considered useful and the U.S. cut them loose. That freed Maliki, a Shiite, to go after them, and go after them he did. A number of their leaders were arrested and some were assassinated. Others were harrased and most were denied job opportunities. Many went into hiding, fearing for their lives. As a result, the Sunnis reacted with bitterness based on their perception that the U.S. had abandoned them and the Maliki government had discriminated against them.

The bitterness increased recently when Maliki, looking towards the March 7th elections, published a list of approximately 500 people who would be blacklisted from running for office. Most were Sunnis and some already held high public office. Many were ex-Baathists, the party of Saddam Hussein, but these individuals had renounced their former allegiance to the Ba’ath party and had sworn to uphold the Iraq constitution.

And now, it has been reported that the Iraqi government has launched another move to undercut the Sunnis. Steve Clemons, publisher of the popular blogsite, the Washington Note, wrote in a Huffington Post article that Maliki had terminated security for the supply route from Jordan that had brought in goods for our service personnel, goods that were provided by Sunni-run companies. As a result, our Department of Defense has stopped bringing in convoys along this route. Maliki’s purpose, according to Clemons, “is to punish Sunni Iraqis in Western Iraq and in Jordan, and to punish the Jordanian government for its efforts to check Iran’s influence in the region.”

So far, the deteriorating situation has not had an impact on the U.S. plan to withdraw its combat troops from Iraq by the end of August, but the future is, to say the least, cloudy.

There was a little good news coming out of the Middle East. As a result of the campaign in Afghanistan’s Helmund province, the commander of NATO and U.S. military forces, General Stanley A. McChrystal, upgraded the situation in Afghanistan from the “deteriorating” level he observed a few months ago to what now appears to him to be “signs of stability.”

(Thanks go to reader WM H for providing the information concerning Steve Clemons and Tom Ricks.)