The Cellar - Pakistan

Its amazing how it has taken the professional US foreign policy and military to finally grasp what pretty much everyone else has known for thirty odd years - that Pakistan and Afghanistan have to be treated as a single unit and, as far as many of the groups in the region are concerned, the Durand Line is just a sketch on a map.

Tommy Franks seemed to think that the Taliban would suddenly start respecting Pakistani territorial integrity once the bombing raids on Afghanistan started, for instance. That is the only reasonable conclusion one can take from his refusal to deploy US troops on the border in sufficient numbers. Dick Cheney seemed to think that the ISI were straight shooters who only worked with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda because they were told to, and not for ideological reasons. That's the only reason I can see why Cheney allowed flights out of Kunduz after the war started, flights which the ISI used to smuggle out major Taliban commanders and who knows how many terrorists.

Even a cursory investigation into the Taliban's campaign in Afghanistan 1994-2000 would have shown how the border regions acted as recruiting grounds for the Taliban, after suffering defeats at the hands of the Tajik and Uzbek militias. How they danced between the borders during hard times. How Khandahar, much closer to the border than Kabul, was the centre of Taliban power in the region and how the Deobandi schools in the FATA churned out thousands of Pashtun soldiers.

The drugs grown in Afghanistan are smuggled down through routes established by the National Logistics Cell, an Army/ISI unit who used to smuggle arms into Afghanistan, in the 80s. The drug profits mostly accrue in Pakistan, where they are invested in factories, political parties and private armies. The Army are likely still behind most of the smuggling, and use it to control politicians through campaign contributions and outright bribery. Highly unpopular Islamist parties are the main recipients, parties whose loyalty is constantly affirmed by their tight adherence to the military's line on every issue, and their legitimizing of the coups and power grabs within the Pakistani state by their patrons. And their schools, teaching a debased and facile history, with heavy doses of Islamist radicalism, continue to provide a steady stream of ideologically correct fighters for the military.

The Pakistani Taliban acts as a dagger at the throat of the civilian government, forcing their cooperation with the real rulers of Pakistan. When the military want something, they throw inexperienced troops and those of uncertain loyalty against the militants, forcing the government to activate emergency laws, shovel more funding in their direction. The international community also coughs up. And then, when it looks like their proxies may slip the leash, they send in the stormtroopers, the death squads. Swat Valley ran red with the blood of tortured and mutiliated Taliban once the military were done with the area.

Plus their idiocy of "strategic depth". The military are convinced that so long as Afghanistan is dependable, that is, run by Islamist nutcases whom they are "advising", then it can act as a counterweight to India. Because a nation of a billion, with a decent sized nuclear arsenal, is going to fear a nation of twenty million allying with a state as dysfunctional as Pakistan? Hardly. Afghanistan may be a useful place to train Islamist terrorists before they infiltrate Kashmir to fight the Indian Army, but terrorists and insurgents alone will never win the war there. Pakistan's efforts would be better spent on repairing relations with India, but they insist on needling them with their state-sponsored terrorism and then claiming they need their proxies to overrun over countries to "protect their security". Yeah, and how's that working out for you so far?

All roads lead back to the Islamist cells in the ISI and military. They sponsored terrorism over Central Asia and the Caucasus for a decade or more, and now we apparently expect them to fight the same terrorism they helped create.

And people wonder why the war is going nowhere.