Islamabad is desperate for support in its civil war against the Taliban - it needs help from India
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- The Guardian, Tuesday 14 April 2009
It is "the most dangerous place in the world", according to Barack Obama. It's also where 90% of our own home-front terrorist threat comes from, according to Gordon Brown. Forget scratched heads and reddening faces over Manchester's missing weapons of destruction. No anxious leader can forget Pakistan - or fail to remember one lethally complex thing. Pakistan's crisis is political as well as religious, economic as well as tribal, personal as well as endemic. Call Jinnah's pure state a failed state now and expect ritual resentment. But ask in return what equals "success", and hear silence descend. The misty, murky road from Operation Pathway is not so long after all.
Nightmare scenarios? General Petraeus hints at Pakistani chaos and collapse only a few months away. Maybe more troops in Afghanistan, more drones over Waziristan and more billions of dollars to bolster President Zardari's rocky regime can turn things around - but maybe (indeed, probably) not. Obama's latest plan for the region wins Nato applause because it sets narrower ends and means: searching out and destroying al-Qaida's safe redoubts. But its credibility drains the moment you cross Pakistan's borders.
Can US troops pursue the Taliban far into tribal territory - or even into the Swat valley, which has slipped, by feeble negotiation, out of central government control? Can drones smashing hamlets and hide-outs do the job instead? Whatever the Pentagon might like to believe, the answer on both counts is a straight no. Pakistan can't cope with anything that seems like American invasion. The drones that kill terrorists also kill innocent villagers. Even robots have no impunity.
Pakistan public opinion simply does not accept that Nato's war is its war as well. Like Pakistan's curiously conflicted army and its squabbling political parties, it cannot yet set the crisis in some neat western framework. Though many thousands of civilians - and many hundreds of troops - have died in this real civil war against real terror, it does not know where it stands or what it believes must be done. It needs help, desperately. The difficulty, though, is that the help it needs most is the help no one seems prepared to give.
A couple of weeks ago, India's leaders were smiling for group photographs in London's Excel Centre, representatives of an economic giant fit to sit alongside China at an expanded world power table. This week India begins another mammoth election process, an epic of democracy. Yet where - in so much of the hustings talk - is there recognition of the peril that Pakistan's internal implosion might bring? And where is the resolve to stretch out a hand of understanding or positive aid?
India's economic advance is new: India's political chieftains, though, are old, and set in their ways. They knew who to blame after Mumbai. They see the Taliban beginning to target Kashmir. They do not trust President Zardari or his army or his spooks. They welcome the announcement by Washington's special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, that India "is the absolutely critical leader in the region" with an enhanced role in Afghanistan, but they leave subcontinental relations frozen as usual. They do not realise they are not absolutely critical in Kabul, but in Islamabad itself.
Pakistan's army, which should be bringing the rule of law to Waziristan and freeing Swat from virulent zealotry, still gazes east when it looks for an enemy. The only foe that matters is India. The weapons and tactics it cares about are designed for another Indian war. Army intelligence, remember, set out to destabilise Russia in Afghanistan because Moscow was seen as New Delhi's friend in the first campaign Osama bin Laden helped finance. The easiest charge against Presidents Karzai and Obama now is that they are too close to India. They have chosen the "wrong side". Are the Taliban allies or monsters, then? Aren't they really fighting the great, all-purpose menace?
It is an increasingly dotty thesis. It idiotically blanks out the trail of murder and gangsterism that tugs Pakistan apart. And yet, until it's laid to rest, Islamabad seems doomed to wallow in a quagmire of indecision. A terrorist training haven 200 million souls strong? A government that suddenly locks up 625 suspects while we suck thumbs over 11? A nation split and split again by religion, politics and sheer incomprehension? This isn't some settled state where Brown can call Zardari and agree protocols as easily as stamping a visa. It's the unsteadiest state around: and any true pathway to rescue it from extremism has to begin with the neighbour who matters most.
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