The case of Bibi Aisha, the young girl who graced the cover of TIME Magazine after her nose and ears were cut off, has been dropped. The only arrested suspect, Aisha's father-in-law, was released in Afghanistan, according to government officials. Aisha has been living in the United States for the past two years following her dramatic recovery, so there is no one available to press charges against Haji Suleiman. The provincial attorney, Ghulam Farouq, maintained that the suspect was innocent since he did not actually cut the young girl. But Suleiman is far from innocent -- he was accused of holding a gun to 18-year-old Aisha while several other men mutilated and left her for dead. He then marched around the village with the young girl's nose in hand. Aisha's father, Mohammedzai, relayed his anger, saying:

"We don't know who released him. We don't know at all. It's either government weakness or our weakness. We don't have money to pay the government and we don't have someone in the government to support us."

Aisha won the hearts of readers around the world with her horrifying tale of survival. She was a servant, a child bride fleeing the brutal abuse of her in-laws who would make her sleep with the animals as if she was an animal herself.

Aisha's father feared what the Taliban would do if Aisha spoke out. But she ignored his advice to keep quiet:

"My father told me not to tell anyone the full truth, that I was given away, that I went to jail for two or three months, not to tell anyone anything. But I will tell them all these things because I am not such a person to lie. I will tell them because I think my story must be told."

Aisha quickly became the face of the Afghan woman's plight -- the United Nations estimates nearly 90 percent of women in Afghanistan suffer from domestic abuse. The haunting photograph of beautiful, but disfigured Aisha draped in a purple scarf, won the 2010 World Press Photo of the Year.

Her attackers may never be brought to justice, but Aisha continues to recover. She is currently studying English in New York City.

Amid last week's carnage in Lahore and Quetta, Pakistan is saying they've cleared Orakzai Agency of militants. They said the same thing barely three months ago (see here for more on June's "victory"). On Friday, militants blew up a girls school in Swat, seven months after announcing the district was "mostly clear", and a year after the army announced it had swept the district clean of Taliban.

Perhaps it's time to invent a term for the amount of time between a Pakistani declaration of victory over the Taliban in a district/province/city, etc., and when the Taliban reappear in the "cleaned" area. How about a "Kayani Unit"?

In order to return to doing something, you needed to have been doing it before.

That was the point made in the media scrum after the Pentagon reported last spring that 14 percent of released Guantanamo detainees went "back to the battlefield." Numerous commentators -- including Peter Bergen at the New America Foundation -- noted that there was little evidence that the released detainees were ever really terrorists at all. For instance, Andy Worthington estimates that 93 percent never had anything to do with al Qaeda. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, picked up on the battlefield or sold into U.S. detention by warlords.

So, I was incredulous when yesterday Bloomberg News reported that the Pentagon said 20 percent of released Guantanamo detainees had "returned" to the fight -- offering no raw data about that jarring statistic.

What it really means: The number is simply not reliable, and the term "recidivism" is not useful. If someone were legitimately a terrorist they should never be let go. For the United States to release even a single real terrorist is a terrifically frightening possibilty -- more frightening than the idea a radical might return to radicalism after a spell in prison. And if the released detainees weren't terrorists before and became terrorists once released -- that's something very, very different indeed.

The Pakistani military reported that they entered and largely cleared the "Taliban headquarters" in South Waziristan today. The reported success is part of a large-scale offensive in the region, which is a stronghold of Tehrik-i-Taliban, an umbrella organization of Pakistani Taliban factions drawn together under the leadership of (the recently-killed) Baitullah Mehsud. The "headquarters" referred to is the town of Makeen, which had been Mehsud's hometown.

How important is it to clear Taliban headquarters, whether in Waziristan or Balochistan? In an interview with FP, Sameer Lalwani, a research fellow at the New America Foundation, argues the answer largely depends on what comes next:

[Makeen] might have been the center of TTP [Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan] organization, but I suspect that at some level, ‘headquarters' doesn't mean as much to an insurgency that's able to melt away and reappear down the road at different locations and continue operations... it certainly disrupts the organization of the group. [But] it's a very fluid network, they have alliances with other neighboring tribes, they're able to parlay their way, probably, for a safe haven within Afghanistan, or in the mountains, for a period of time.

So, it really depends on what the follow-up operations are.... I think this is one of the biggest demonstrations of Pakistani commitment, in their ground invasion of South Waziristan, and the most targeted, and probably one of the stronger efforts we've seen in recent years, but I'd still be apprehensive to say this is a categorical success, even [having] secured a few militant strongholds and, I guess, the center of operations, because the real question becomes ‘how long can they hold it?'"

The Taliban certainly isn't handing the territory off. Responding to Pakistan's recent military successes, a Taliban spokesman said simply, "We are prepared for a long war."

Photo: NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/Getty Images

We're two installments into New York Times writer David Rohde's five-part epic on the seven months he spent as a hostage of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And I can't recommend it enough to anyone interested in the country. Here's one fascinating excerpt, from the first part:

Over those months, I came to a simple realization. After seven years of reporting in the region, I did not fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become. Before the kidnapping, I viewed the organization as a form of "Al Qaeda lite," a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan.

Living side by side with the Haqqanis' followers, I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world.

Rohde's revelations about his kidnappers themselves are even more interesting. The Times reporter, his driver, and his translator were on their way to interview a Taliban leader, Abu Tayyeb, when their car was hijacked. They were taken hostage by one Atiqullah, who said he had never heard of Abu Tayyeb. A few weeks into his detention, Rohde finds:

In conversations when our guards left the room, Tahir and Asad each separately whispered to me that Atiqullah was, in fact, Abu Tayyeb. They had known since the day we were kidnapped, they said, but dared not tell me. They asked me to stay silent as well. Abu Tayyeb had vowed to behead them if they revealed his true identity. Abu Tayyeb had invited us to an interview, betrayed us and then pretended that he was a commander named Atiqullah. I was despondent and left with only one certainty: We had no savior among the Taliban.

It's gripping, cinematic stuff -- and all the better knowing there's at least something of a happy ending. (Though Rohde is getting raked over the coals in his New York Times Q&A.) 

With detail like this, the articles show the Taliban in all its diversity. Rohde notes that many members of the Taliban are far more religious and radical than they were 8 years ago. But the movement has fragmented and atomized. Rohde notes that his captors were in essence common thieves, not ideological warriors, driven by and even obsessed with money.

That's why initiatives to bribe and negotiate with Taliban leaders, paying them in exchange for security, seem so attractive to me. The sums of money wouldn't need to be great -- there's not much to buy in Afghanistan anyway. Plus, there are only around 10,000 members of the Taliban remaining in Afghanistan, only 3,000 of whom are full-time militants. (Note, for a sense of scale there: Afghanistan is a good-sized country with a population of 33 million.) And the strategy has worked well elsewhere.