Power-Sharing - Goftaman.com

Pakistan, the Pakistani intelligence agency made a presentation charging that intelligenceagents in the Indian consulates in Jalalabad and Qandahar were funneling weapons andfunds to opposition groups in Pakistan, in particular the insurgency in Baluchistan.President Bush endorsed Musharraf’s commitment to the war on terror, even asthe latter admitted there had been some “slippage” in Pakistan’s performance, perhapsalluding to the terrorist killing of a U.S. diplomat and four others in Karachi the daybefore Bush’s arrival and the virtual occupation of the Waziristan Tribal Agencies byTaliban and foreign jihadists, who declared an Islamic state there. Pakistan launched athree-day offensive against these groups the day before Bush arrived, taking the town ofMiran Shah and killing over one hundred guerrillas and civilians as ten thousandresidents fled the area. The magnitude of the engagement indicated the Taliban andforeign jihadists had a greater presence and more control of territory in Pakistan than inAfghanistan. American officials privately acknowledge that parts of the Pakistani statemay not be fully on board. They argue that, given Musharraf’s vulnerability (he hasbarely escaped assassination four times), Washington should stick to a policy of “publicsupport and private pressure,” so as to not destabilize the regime. This approach rests onthe belief that stability in Pakistan depends solely on the military, a self-serving viewpromoted by the latter to their American counterparts for decades, and one that hassurvived the Bush administration’s claim to move from a commitment to stability to acommitment to “freedom.” President Bush did raise the issue of “democracy” during hisvisit, by which he apparently meant the holding of elections, but there is no indicationthat he discussed the fundamental issue of military dominance of the most important stateinstitutions, including the judiciary.Stabilizing this region requires a comprehensive policy toward the Afghanistan-Pakistan relationship, whose interaction with the India-Pakistan conflict has been thesource of the region’s troubles for nearly sixty years and now threatens global security.Although the most immediate issue is the bases and support networks for jihadiextremists in Pakistan, the use of these networks by the Pakistani military for severaldecades derives from that state’s reliance on asymmetric warfare to compensate for itsfundamental insecurity, which cannot be relieved solely by increasing pressure.Afghanistan and Pakistan will be unable to extricate themselves from this conflict12