It seems that the U.S. government finally understood that invading tribal areas in Pakistan will not help the situation there and in Afghanistan:

U.S. special operations forces have paused ground operations in Pakistan’s tribal areas, but military and civilian government officials differ over why the cross-border raids have been halted.

But this stay may only be a temporary:

“We are now working with the Pakistanis to make sure that those type of ground-type insertions do not happen, at least for a period of time to give them an opportunity to do what they claim they are desiring to do,” the Pentagon official said, adding that this did not apply to air strikes launched from unmanned aerial vehicles at targets inside the tribal areas.

…
[A] U.S. government official closely involved with policy in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region said the military had underestimated the Pakistani response and was reconsidering its options.

Really the military? It seems that someone who ordered the Joint Special Forces Command to do the raid has gone wild with these attacks and that there was no coordination with other forces in the area.

Jeff Huber points out that instead of unity of command there are at least four U.S. chains of fools that act independent of each other. ISAF/NATO is under the U.S. European command, the area logistics for Afghanistan and Pakistan fall under Central Command, the special forces that raided Pakistan are under Joint Special Forces Command and the drone flights that attempt targeted killing are a CIA operation with support from the U.S. Northern Command. There is also a split between the military and the State Department and a hodgepodge of uncoordinated aid agencies that trample on each other feet while ignoring the Afghan government.

This seems to be a somewhat intentional construct by the White House which wants real command power only for itself and thereby creates the typical mess:

The raid represented “a strategic
miscalculation,” the U.S. government official said. “We did not fully
appreciate the vehemence of the Pakistani response,” which included the
Pakistan government’s implication that it was willing to cut the
coalition’s supply lines through Pakistan. “I don’t think we really
believed it was going to go to that level,” the government official
said.

In the White House sits a gung-ho president who loves to hear Tom
Clancy like stories of special operations. It is he who ordered the
raids:

When
JSOC forces cross the border into Pakistan, they do so only after
receiving clearances from the highest levels of the U.S. government,
sources said. However, exactly who has the authority to approve JSOC’s
missions into Pakistan is shrouded in secrecy.
…
“Even a missile strike requires the highest level of authority,” a special operations officer with Afghanistan experience said.

Asked who would have to sign off on a mission into Pakistan, he replied: “The president, no doubt in my mind. The president.”

While
ground raids were halted for now, I expect that there will be continued
bombing from Unmanned Ariel Vehicles, like the one the Pakistanis shoot down last week. (Though maybe that one was a British drone.)

In other news the British Observer reports
on talks between the Afghan Government and the Taliban, supported by
Britain and most important by Saudi Arabia. The idea is to bring some
Taliban commander like Mullah Omar into the government. The Taliban
demand, while not yet sufficiently clear, includes an end of the
foreign occupation.

An accompanying piece finds it unlikely that the U.S. would agree to this:

Hekmat
Karzai, director of a think tank in Kabul, said that although
discussions with the Taliban ‘might not be too difficult… getting the
international community on board would be extremely hard’.

The Saudis will have to pressure Washington to give the plan some chance.