I’ve carped at length about Musharraf’s decision to cede large swaths of the border region to locals in exchange for a reduced militancy from the Taliban. The result was predictable:
As senior administration officials now acknowledge, Gen. Musharraf’s assurances were empty — as they have been many times before. According to multiple independent reports, Waziristan has been thoroughly Talibanized, and the fundamentalists are spreading their influence through adjacent border districts. Cross-border attacks and the deaths of American soldiers that they cause are up significantly. Al-Qaeda is reliably reported to be operating training camps in North Waziristan with the help of scores of foreign militants who are schooling recruits in suicide bombing and the use of improvised explosive devices. According to a stunning report in the current edition of Newsweek, they are also preparing Western citizens who could carry out major terrorist attacks in Britain or the United States.
Ignore the passive voice and think for a moment about the implications of this: western Pakistan in 2006 very closely resembles Afghanistan in 2000: an Al-Qaeda haven, a lawless region where the militants, already popular with the locals for their uncompromising stance on Islam, are given virtually free reign to do whatever they please. And NATO is forbidden pursuit rights, allowing daring hit-and-run attacks from Pakistan into the unstable southern provinces.
Meanwhile, inexplicably, further south, the locals are being slowly starved out by the government. It’s almost like Musharraf wants the Taliban to rise again. I just hope NATO doesn’t think it can count on the Germans to contribute anything to the fight.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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Both of these comments were way off topic, so I deleted them. To the posters: consider this your last warning: keep your comments on topic, or you won’t get to comment any more.