Pakistan's shift alarms the US By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - Ongoing tension between India and Pakistan in the wake of the terror
attack on the Indian city of Mumbai last November in which 179 people died at
the hands of gunmen linked to Pakistan has clouded Islamabad's role in the
United States-led "war on terror".
Mindful of this, US Central Command commander General David Petraeus paid a
one-day visit to Pakistan on Tuesday. In meetings with senior officials,
including army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani, Petraeus said that the US and
the international community would continue to support Pakistan, but it needed
"to put its house in order" on the issue of militants.
The US is already looking ahead to this year's round of fighting in
Afghanistan against the Taliban-led insurgency once winter passes. Petraeus has
committed to a surge in US troop numbers to about 60,000, but Pakistan's
cooperation in dealing with militants based in its tribal areas is essential.
The militants use these bases to support their operations in Afghanistan.
On Tuesday, Petraeus announced a partial solution to another problem that has
dogged the war efforts in Afghanistan. He said a new supply route to
Afghanistan had been agreed on with Central Asian states and Russia as an
option to the one that passes though Khyber Agency, the Pakistani tribal area
bordering Afghanistan through which nearly 80% of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization's (NATO) supplies pass on the way to landlocked Afghanistan.
"There have been agreements reached and there are transit lines now and transit
agreements for commercial goods and services in particular that include several
countries in the Central Asian states and also Russia," Petraeus said. This
means NATO supplies will have to travel by the most expensive route to reach
Afghanistan, which will push up the costs of an already very expensive war.
NATO supplies through the agency have increasingly been under attack since
early 2008 and the agency, once a peaceful area, is a new war theater between
the Pakistani security forces and the Taliban.
NATO has repeatedly urged Pakistan to do something about protecting the route,
but it has been helpless because of a serious lack of human resources as many
of its forces are engaged in combating the Taliban in Bajaur Agency and in the
Swat Valley.
And significantly, following the Mumbai attack, Islamabad has moved troops from
the border with Afghanistan to the border with India, where Indian troops are
also mobilized. On Tuesday, India tested a cruise missile close to the Pakistan
border. An Indian Defense Ministry spokesman said a Brahmos supersonic cruise
missile had been successfully fired. The missiles have a range of up to several
hundred kilometers.
It is Pakistan's focus on India that has Washington concerned, yet the
heightened tensions between Islamabad and Delhi suit both countries. India has
to hold general elections before May, and the ruling Congress-led government
needs to be seen as doing something about the Mumbai attacks. Pakistan,
meanwhile, has an excuse to bail out its highly demoralized troops on the
western borders with Afghanistan by moving them to the Indian border.
Relations between the countries are likely to remain frosty for some time.
Pakistan has now agreed to the trial of leaders of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the
terror group linked to the Mumbai attack. Delhi has handed over files of
evidence which range from Pakistani-manufactured shaving cream used by the
gunmen to the Pakistani-manufactured boat engine the men used to get to Mumbai.
In another development, shortly before Petraeus met with Pakistani officials,
Maulana Fazlur Rahman, the head of his own faction of the
Jamaat-i-Ulema-i-Islam political party, met with President Asif Ali Zardari and
received a military backed green light to negotiate truces with Pakistani
militants.
Rahman did this job successfully in 2005, which resulted in a ceasefire between
the Pakistani Taliban and the Pakistani security forces in April 2006.
Consequently, the Taliban made a successful comeback in Afghanistan in the
spring of 2006 - their first powerful offensive since their regime was driven
out of Kabul in 2001.
This will be of grave concern to Petraeus ahead of the next real battle against
the Taliban that starts in April. The foremost concern is over the most
effective deployment of the additional troops in Afghanistan. Permanent ground
deployment comes with problems, as the Pakistani military has learned in Bajaur
Agency, where its troops become sitting ducks at the hands of guerrillas
operating from safe mountain sanctuaries. Yet if the troops are not deployed on
the ground, the whole exercise of bringing in more of them and making
additional arrangements for their supplies will be a waste of time and money.
The last thing Petraeus needs now is for Pakistan to continue with its focus on
India while effectively handing over its western borders to the Taliban, yet
this process is already underway.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can
be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com
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