Two articles today raise the question of whether Pakistan is as two-faced in its anti-terror policy as Saudi Arabia.

In a review of Husain Haqqani’s “Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military,” Alyssa Ayres writes in the Wall Street Journal ($ req’d):

Mr. Haqqani hopes to defy the conventional wisdom that sees Pakistan as perpetually balancing two forces, with a strong military holding in check the radical excesses of the country’s mosques. Mr. Haqqani does not believe that the generals and the mullahs are adversaries at all. Rather, they exist in a kind of symbiosis — an alliance by which each helps the other “in their exercise of political power.” What is more, the alliance has been in place since the country’s founding.

… He thus shows that Pakistan’s creeping Islamization predates the rule of Gen. Zia ul-Haq (1977-88), the man widely held responsible for giving Islam a major role in all aspects of Pakistani life. Gen. Zia, it turns out, only tightened an alliance that already existed.

Mr. Haqqani argues that, over the past two decades, Pakistan’s army has fueled the passions of some of the country’s most extreme radicals. Bankrolling these groups has served the strategic purpose of rendering the military desirable by contrast. International observers — not least the U.S. State Department — thus conclude that the military is necessary for Pakistan’s stability. The shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) has played an especially critical role in this game.

And in Thursday’s Los Angeles Times, reporter Paul Watson sends from Afghanistan:

Telephone and power lines haven’t reached the villages clinging to the craggy mountainsides of Kunar province. Digital phones and computer chips are even further beyond the shepherds’ imaginations.

So when sophisticated bombs detonated by long-range cordless phones began blowing up under U.S. and Afghan military vehicles on mountain tracks, investigators knew they had to search elsewhere for the masterminds.

Afghan officials immediately focused on nearby Pakistan and its military, whose Inter-Services Intelligence agency helped create the Taliban in the early 1990s and provided training and equipment to help the Muslim extremists win control over most of the country.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf joined the Bush administration’s war on terrorism and publicly turned against the Taliban immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. But Afghan officials allege that Taliban and allied fighters who fled to Pakistan after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 are learning new, more lethal tactics from the Pakistani military at numerous training bases.

These separate data points don’t sound like paranoia. It’s hard to see how the Afghan officers quoted in the LAT piece would benefit from exaggerating Pakistani influence, so their suspicions have to be given some credence. And Husain Haqqani, the author of the book, was a journalist, diplomat, and advisor to three Pakistani prime ministers.

The U.S. has to watch its back.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 28th, 2005 at 7:44 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under War, Los Angeles Times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.