Sydney Morning Herald:

Tolerance runs out in Pakistan's lethal game
October 4, 2011
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The polite veil finally has been torn off, exposing one of the nastiest secrets in world affairs - one of the pivotal countries fighting the ''war on terror'' has also been one of the main exporters of terror. Pakistan has been playing this double game for many years now. Its political leaders publicly avow full co-operation with the US in hunting down al-Qaeda and other terrorists. But, at the very same time, its army and intelligence service covertly incubate and arm some of the world's most vicious terrorist groups.
Australian army commanders in Afghanistan have been confounded and frustrated by this for the past decade. They see insurgent fighters move from Pakistan into Afghanistan to shoot at them and other coalition forces, and then see them disappear back into Pakistan. At the same time, they've had to listen to their top brass and ministers and leaders of the US and Australia, among others, praise Pakistan for its sterling efforts in the struggle against global terrorism.
The glaring contradiction between words and deeds grew harder to sustain as the years went by and evidence mounted linking one atrocity after another to the Pakistani Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, universally known as the ISI.

But the polite fiction was maintained even when Osama bin Laden was found to have been living in a compound only a kilometre from the Pakistani Military Academy, in a neighbourhood full of retired Pakistani military officers. How long had the al-Qaeda leader been sheltered in the midst of the Pakistani security establishment? Five to six years, on the evidence to date.

Two events pushed Pakistan's allies too far. One was the attack on the US embassy in Kabul on September 13. It led to a 20-hour siege and about 25 deaths. The attack was mounted by the Haqqani group of terrorists. This goaded the top US military officer, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, into sheeting home blame in the final public appearance of his term.

''The Haqqani network,'' Mullen told a US Senate committee, ''acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.'' He said the US had ''credible evidence'' that Pakistan was behind a range of terrorist and insurgent attacks. His comments electrified the US Congress. Senator Lindsey Graham said the US should put ''all options on the table'' if Haqqani group attacks continued. At the very least, the $2 billion in annual US aid to Pakistan is now in jeopardy.

The US rhetoric has alarmed Pakistan, which has denied any connection to the attacks. The President, Asif Ali Zardari, convened a meeting of all political parties at his house; in a rare moment of unity, they unanimously denounced the accusation, rallied around the army and vowed to stand up to US pressure.
A second event pushed a second Pakistan ally to put pretence aside and blame Pakistan for extremist destabilisation. When a supposed Taliban peace emissary stuffed his turban with explosives and went to a meeting with the former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, blowing himself and Rabbani to pieces on September 20, it was too much. Rabbani was in charge of a year-long effort to establish peace negotiations with the Taliban.
On Friday, the Afghanistan President, Hamid Karzai, declared the negotiations over before they had started: ''I do not have any other answer other than saying that the other side of the talks is Pakistan,'' Karzai said, implicitly holding Pakistan responsible. ''A messenger comes disguised as a Taliban council member and kills, and they neither confirm nor reject it. Therefore we cannot talk to anyone but to Pakistan.''

One of Karzai's aides, Rangin Dadfar Spanta, told the Wall Street Journal the attack was ''not possible without the know-how, without the operative support of the ISI''.

Again, Pakistan's leaders denied any connection. So the Afghan government is sending a delegation to deliver evidence to Islamabad. Karzai has promised a major speech to announce a new strategy.

A Pakistani journalist, Kiran Nazish, points out that ''it's not just the current government that is to blame - Pakistan has a two-and-a-half decade-long history of producing, maintaining and utilising terrorist outfits'', going back to 1979 when it helped create the mujahideen who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan. This was where bin Laden got his first combat experience.

And Nazish laments that Pakistan ''is not just producing terrorism, but is, in fact, also its worst hit target''. Some 35,000 Pakistanis have been killed by Islamist terror groups in the past decade.

Aqil Shah, a Harvard fellow, says, ''For Pakistan's overfed, unrestrained, and irresponsible generals, it seems that the perceived benefits of nurturing violent extremist groups are still much higher than the costs.'' The costs have been low partly because the US has put up with it, he says. ''The administration rewarded bad behaviour and got more of the same,'' he writes in the journal Foreign Affairs.
And the benefits? Pakistan's main security preoccupation is always India. By playing a double game, it has operated an overt alliance with the US and received America's billions, while using its terrorist links to destabilise any arrangement it perceives as allowing India to establish influence in Afghanistan.

The attacks on the US embassy in Kabul and the assassination of Rabbani appear calculated to wreck a peace settlement in Afghanistan. Why? Because Pakistan has been shut out of the process. It is demanding a role in the post-US political settlement in Afghanistan. It is using terrorists to deliver the message.

This is the only news among the bloodshed and the chaos that offers any hope. Motivation for the attacks is plainly political; a political solution is therefore possible.
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