The AIG Of Foreign Affairs

By Cernig

Brandon Friedman has a good analogy:

For the financially-minded who have trouble prioritizing between Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, here's one way to think of it: Pakistan is the AIG of international affairs.  It's on the verge.  And the world has to prevent it from collapsing.  Because if it goes down--nukes and all--it's taking everybody down with it.

It's terrifying to think that George W. Bush and John McCain--blinded by their obsession with Iraq--don't see this.

And at the NY Times, Dexter Filkins writes:

“All roads lead to FATA,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik said.

If the past is any guide, Mr. Malik’s statement is almost certainly correct.

But what Mr. Malik did not say was that those same roads, if he chose to follow them, would very likely loop back to Islamabad itself...the Taliban militias now threatening the stability of Pakistan owe their survival — and much of their present strength — to a succession of Pakistani governments that continues to the present day.

...After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, then-President Pervez Musharraf publicly promised to break with the Taliban. For that, Pakistan was rewarded with nearly $10 billion in American aid. But over the years, something else happened: whatever President Musharraf said in public, the military and intelligence services over which he presided demonstrated every intention of strengthening the Taliban, who fled en masse to the borderlands after their expulsion from Kabul in November 2001.

Over the years, the evidence has been too obvious to ignore. In 2002, for instance, Mr. Musharraf ordered the arrest of some 2,000 suspected militants — many of whom had trained in Pakistani-sponsored camps. Weeks later, without fanfare, he released nearly all of them.

...The Pakistanis have launched a series of offensives, and all of them have ended with the militants stronger than ever. It may be that the Pakistan Army is too inept to destroy the Taliban, but there is abundant evidence suggesting that at least some elements of the army do not want to do that.

“I would not rule out the possibility that explicit deals were made by the military,” the American military official said.

With the arrival of Pakistan’s new civilian government last February, the situation seems more intractable than ever.

But Pakistan's civilian government are following the same policy of outright public deial as Musharraf did. There's not even a suggestion that there might be some "bad apples" still inside the military and ISI intelligence agency. Yesterday, President Zardari told Wolf Blitzer, among other things, that he has complete control of the military. I doubt many believed him.

Which is not to say I agree with US incursions into Pakistan. On the contrary, I think they're dangerously destabilizing. I've said previously that the second part of Barack Obama's policy on Pakistan is the bit he should be concentrating upon.