Afghanistan-Pakistan War

Scott Horton interviews the Pakistani analyst Ahmed Rashid, one of the leading authorities on Al Qa'ida and the conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Inside the Pakistan-Taliban Relationship No Comment blog 07/30/08). Rashid has this to say about how Pakistan reacted to the American policy in the early months of the Afghanistan War in 2001-2:

The Pakistani military was stunned at the lackadaisical attitude of the Americans in mopping up Al Qaeda, and the U.S. failure to commit ground troops in the south and then at Tora Bora convinced the Pakistani army that the Americans were not serious, that they preferred that the Northern Alliance militias do their fighting for them. Pakistani officers told me they were amazed that Rumsfeld would not put even one thousand U.S. soldiers into battle. The ISI sent memos to Musharraf stating that the Americans would not stay long in Afghanistan and that the Taliban should be kept alive.

This lack of U.S. interest coincided with the interests of the Pakistani army: to go after Al Qaeda, but to allow the Taliban to resettle in Pakistan. Quite soon the Taliban was once again patronized by the ISI. The reason was that the Pakistani army was deeply offended by the Bonn agreement, which actually gave all power to the Northern Alliance – who were deemed the enemies of Pakistan and the Taliban because they had been backed in the civil war by India, Russia, and Iran (the regional opponents of the Taliban and Pakistan during the 1990s decade-long civil war in Afghanistan). Later, India asserted itself in Afghanistan by opening an embassy and four consulates in Afghanistan and then announced a large reconstruction program in Pakistan. Pakistan’s military told the West that Indian influence was undermining Pakistan’s interests in Afghanistan and also subverting Pakistan by funding and supporting the Baloch insurgency in Balochistan province. Today India's presumed influence in Afghanistan is the principle gripe of the military. I think the Americans knew quite early what was going on between the military and the Taliban, but were prepared to ignore it as long as Musharraf helped out with Al Qaeda and as long as the United States remained bogged down in Iraq. (my emphasis)

For Pakistan, Afghanistan has to be seen in the context of the India-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir. That dispute is well known among Muslims. But American reporting on Pakistan rarely mentions that dimension of the situation, so far as I can see.

Tags: afghanistan war, kashmir, pakistan, rummy, rumsfeld