Not Very Neighborly Posted by Patrick Barry

A few months ago I called for the U.S. to exercise patience with the new Pakistani Government after they announced plans for a talks with notorious Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud.  At the time, I was somewhat open to the prospect of Pakistanis adopting a new strategy, largely because Musharraf's policies had been so ineffectual. 

Unfortunately, the events of the past few weeks have left me feeling skeptical about whether Pakistan' hoped to accomplish anything besides leaving their Afghan neighbors out in the cold.  Today's statements by Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi did absolutely nothing to shift my opinion:

"We will not engage with terrorists, we will not compromise with terrorists. And those who would take up arms and guns are neither your friends nor our friends"

It's difficult to make remarks like that and expect people to take you seriously, when earlier this week Baitullah Mehsud boldly held his own press conference for Pakistani journalists, during which he claimed that he would continue his struggle in Afghanistan.  Which is more meaningful to Afghanis?  The assurances of a Pakistani Minister, or the threats of one of the Taliban's most fearsome leaders, a man who organized a conference of insurgents in Waziristan that reportedly culminated in a public execution?  Add all this to the news last week that high-level Pakistani officials had suspended their cooperation with their Afghani and NATO counterparts over the restless border areas, and you have the makings for a very bad situation. 

Contrary to the hope I expressed a month ago, it seems more and more that the new government in Islamabad is taking a position similar to what had been the longstanding policy of Musharraf and others: insulate Pakistan at the expense of heightened instability in Afghanistan. There are a whole host of reasons why this method isn't likely to work, mostly having to do with the porousness of the Afghan-Pakistan border, and the tendency of the Taliban to renege on it's promises, as it did following Musharraf's peace agreement in 2006.  The biggest difference for the United States is that this time, we have much less ability to influence the situation.    

Comments

[Zathras]

Pervez Musharraf was never completely "our man" in Pakistan, but he was not close to being our biggest problem there.

Our biggest problem was and is the large number of thoroughly unreasonable people in that country who think terrorism in Afghanistan is a good thing, terrorism in India is even better and terrorism is Pakistan itself is OK, too, unless they are getting paid not to engage in it. Musharraf (and even more the army he came from) wanted Pakistan to look as if it could fight a war with India, but he didn't want to actually fight one, and actually did more to reduce violence in Kashmir than the previous Pakistani government had been willing to do.

Many of his enemies within Pakistan deeply resented him for this, and for working with the Americans against the Taliban. He was never strong enough to crush them, but the civilian government that has replaced him is not strong enough even to oppose them. Of course, it is more democratic, and that is just swell, but a more democratic government that seeks to appease its more fanatical enemies by removing obstacles to their conducting terrorism in neighboring countries is really not an improvement from the American point of view.

[Don Bacon]

Looking at an ethnolinguistic map of Pakistan - Afghanistan we see that the P/A border, the Durand Line, cuts right through the Pushtun tribal areas. The Durand Line is named after Sir Mortimer Durand, the foreign secretary of the British Indian government. It meant a lot to Mortimer, but it doesn't mean beans to Pushtuns.