The militants wage war in Afghanistan while using Pakistan as a place for rest, recuperation and recruitment.
By SADANAND DHUME
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the so-called Afghanistan war logs released by WikiLeaks Sunday is our continued capacity to be shocked.
That the war isn’t going as well as advertised is already painfully evident—last week alone, the Taliban kidnapped two American sailors and killed five soldiers. Allegations of Pakistani double-dealing—of accepting a torrent of American dollars with one hand while arming and sheltering the Taliban with the other—are hardly new. Nor are revelations that the country’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has apparently perfected its own version of don’t ask, don’t tell. Don’t ask your clandestine operatives too many questions about their ties with Islamist militants, and don’t tell the Americans more than the minimum required to keep the aid faucet open.
But the detail gives the leaked documents their punch. Even if some of their gaudier revelations—say a plot to sell American troops poisoned alcohol, or to assassinate Afghan officials with a bomb disguised as a gold Quran—need to be taken with a grain of salt, they nonetheless create a bleak picture of life on the ground for American troops.
Most of all, they show how the gaggle of Islamist groups fighting NATO in Afghanistan—primarily the Taliban and its allies, militants loyal to Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—have an advantage that more than makes up for their inferior equipment and training. The militants wage war in Afghanistan while using Pakistan as a sanctuary for rest, recuperation and recruitment.
Ironically, one of the best explanations of Islamabad’s perfidy comes from Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, D.C., and the man charged with the unenviable task of explaining to outraged Americans why their tax dollars—$18 billion since 2001—must continue to flow to a country with so much American blood on its hands. In a seminal book, “Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military,” written five years ago when Mr. Haqqani was a critic of his country’s government rather than its representative, he examined the symbiotic relationship between Pakistan’s generals and its Islamic fundamentalists. In a nutshell, Mr. Haqqani argues that in Pakistan—unlike, say, in secular Turkey or Indonesia—the mosque and the military have always been allies rather than adversaries.
This alliance has roots in both ideology and realpolitik. On the one hand, the army (of which the ISI is the intelligence wing) sees itself as the guarantor of the world’s first nation created purely on the basis of Islam. Its motto: “Faith, Piety and Jihad in the Path of Allah.” Historically, even those generals who have had no interest in turning Pakistan into an Islamist state by formally applying Shariah law—among them the dictators Ayub Khan and Pervez Musharraf—have championed aggression toward Pakistan’s neighbors, primarily India and Afghanistan.
For Islamist-leaning generals, the army’s rank and file and most of the fervently anti-American Pakistani masses, bloodying America in Afghanistan represents a triumph over the infidel akin to what they experienced in 1989 when the last Soviet troops limped home. For the more secular minded, it gives Pakistan the so-called strategic depth it has long sought against its much larger neighbor India.
Read more at wsj.com……
