At Combat Outpost Hutal, west of Kandahar City, soldiers prepare their truckers for the day's patrols. The various antennas rising above the base are for serveral different kinds of radios, cell phones, secure internet signals, bomb jammers and anti-sniper electronics. They make for a sometimes bizarre landscape.

The Afghan Parliament reacted furiously Thursday to a ruling by a Special Court that could land at least a quarter of the lawmakers out of a job.

In a televised session, the five-member panel announced their decisions on a recount of parliamentary ballots that would disqualify more than 40 of the 249 current MPs. The final head roll could be more than 70.

The hastily assembled MPs called for street protests and threatened to defy the court, which they have long held has no legal standing.

The legislature has been in high dudgeon since December, ever since President Hamid Karzai instituted a Special Court to adjudicate cases of fraud in last September’s parliamentary elections.

Few would dispute that the ballot was highly irregular; but according to Afghanistan’s Election Law, final decisions on electoral matters are to be taken by the Independent Election Commission and the Electoral Complaints Commission.

These two bodies took more than two months to finalize the results of the elections, but once they announced their decision, lawmakers breathed a sigh of relief. The president also tried to delay the Parliament’s inauguration, since, rumor had it, he was not pleased with its composition. He finally opened the legislature in late January, but not before establishing the Special Court.

Legal analysts, Afghan officials and many international observers agree with the Parliament that the Special Court has no legal standing to rule on electoral matters, but this does not seem to bother the executive branch. Karzai had a constitutional commission rule that the Court was perfectly in line with the law, and the five court members proceeded with their investigation.

Parliamentarians complained that the court was a political tool for Karzai, allowing him to pressure recalcitrant lawmakers. Anyone who did not fall in line with the president’s plan could be threatened with disqualification by the court, they insisted.

Along with the continuing tension over the court, the legislature and the executive branch have been warring over the cabinet. In January of 2010, Karzai sent his nominees to the old Parliament for confirmation. Out of 24 candidates, the legislature rejected 17. After a second try and some determined lobbying by the executive branch, all but seven were confirmed.

It's been less than five months since CIA operative Raymond Davis opened fire on the streets of Lahore, killing two men. A third Pakistani man was killed that day when he was struck by a car carrying several other CIA operatives who were speeding to the scene down the wrong side of the street.

This, to no one's surprise, resulted in a great deal of public anger in Pakistan. Large protests were held across the country demanding that the CIA halt its activities in the country. Davis was arrested and charged with murder. The case was eventually settled after Davis paid off the victim's families, a common practice in Pakistan.

Anger among Pakistanis was so high in the aftermath of the attack that the CIA temporarily halted drone attacks in North Waziristan, which, also to no one's surprsise, are deeply unpopular among average Pakistanis, more than a thousand of whom (at least) have been killed by the missile strikes since they began in 2004.

The CIA resumed drone attacks on March 18, two days after Davis was released. Then, two months later, the United States raided a house outside of Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, killing Osama bin Laden.

All of this is believed to have frayed relations between the two countries to the point of no return.

Yet, on Wednesday, Pakistan said it would issue three dozen visas to CIA operatives so they can continue their anti-terror operations in the country.

A new poll released today by the Pew Research Center found that Pakistanis, while they disapproved of the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden outside of Islamabad in May, don't dislike the United States any more than they did before the raid.

That might be because opinions of the U.S. in Pakistan before the raid had already fallen to record lows.

The new poll found that just 12 percent of Pakistanis have a positive view of the United States and only 8 percent are confident that U.S. President Barack Obama will do the right thing when it comes to world affairs. That's pretty abysmal. But it's hardly different than before the raid when the Pew Research Center conducted another poll that found that only 11 percent of Pakistanis had a favorable view of the United States and 75 percent had unfavorable view.

That puts Obama and the United States at about the same level as Al Qaeda and the Taliban, both of which received approval ratings of about 12 percent.