Double game of paranoid Pakistan
- From:The Times
- May 05, 2011
- ==============================================
Thanks to the sacrifices of his soldiers, the Pakistan army chief said, the "back of terrorism" in the country had been broken.
A few hundred metres away, the man who had dragged Pakistan into the war on terror 10 years earlier, sat quietly inside his sprawling fortified compound dining on roasted goat.
Could Pakistan's leaders really have been ignorant that Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted man, was living in the heart of a garrison town within commuting distance of Islamabad?
Washington feared not. Ten years of dealing with Pakistan's institutional sclerosis informed the decision not to tell Islamabad of the Navy SEALs' daring raid.
Pakistan's response - chaotic, contradictory and faintly desperate - underlines all that the world still has to fear from the dysfunction of the nuclear-armed state.
Its world view has long been distorted by its paranoid preoccupation with India. Its powerful intelligence service, the ISI, played midwife to the Taliban's birth to deny India a foothold in Afghanistan.
Former president Pervez Musharraf committed his nation to helping Washington to avenge the 9/11 attacks only after India had already offered. So began a long-running and highly lucrative double game with Washington that lasts until this day.
Pakistan never believed that US troops would stay in Afghanistan, so it continued to plan for the Taliban's restoration while taking billions in American military aid to do the reverse.
In 2008, the Central Intelligence Agency confronted Pakistan's leaders with evidence that the ISI had plotted the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, killing 54. General Kayani vowed to find out what these "rogue" ISI men were up to.
The Americans were unconvinced by the performance. Until a year earlier, General Kayani had been the head of the ISI.
He remains the power behind Islamabad's throne. The chaos of the civilian leadership was laid bare this week with the wildly contradictory reactions to the killing of bin Laden, with a Pakistan ambassador in one country insisting it was a joint operation and the high commissioner in another professing official ignorance.
This is a government on the run from its own people, equally terrified of inflaming public opinion and of losing the billions in American aid without which the economy would collapse.
Pakistan's military is not the world's finest. It has lost every war it has fought.
It is possible that even in a garrison town crawling with officers, no one questioned the towering compound.
It stretches credulity, however, to believe that the ISI did not know of it. Was bin Laden living under de facto state protection?
And what does the fact that we even have to ask tell us about Pakistan?
The Times
(source:theaustralian.com.au)
===============================================
A few hundred metres away, the man who had dragged Pakistan into the war on terror 10 years earlier, sat quietly inside his sprawling fortified compound dining on roasted goat.
Could Pakistan's leaders really have been ignorant that Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted man, was living in the heart of a garrison town within commuting distance of Islamabad?
Washington feared not. Ten years of dealing with Pakistan's institutional sclerosis informed the decision not to tell Islamabad of the Navy SEALs' daring raid.
Pakistan's response - chaotic, contradictory and faintly desperate - underlines all that the world still has to fear from the dysfunction of the nuclear-armed state.
Its world view has long been distorted by its paranoid preoccupation with India. Its powerful intelligence service, the ISI, played midwife to the Taliban's birth to deny India a foothold in Afghanistan.
Former president Pervez Musharraf committed his nation to helping Washington to avenge the 9/11 attacks only after India had already offered. So began a long-running and highly lucrative double game with Washington that lasts until this day.
Pakistan never believed that US troops would stay in Afghanistan, so it continued to plan for the Taliban's restoration while taking billions in American military aid to do the reverse.
In 2008, the Central Intelligence Agency confronted Pakistan's leaders with evidence that the ISI had plotted the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, killing 54. General Kayani vowed to find out what these "rogue" ISI men were up to.
The Americans were unconvinced by the performance. Until a year earlier, General Kayani had been the head of the ISI.
He remains the power behind Islamabad's throne. The chaos of the civilian leadership was laid bare this week with the wildly contradictory reactions to the killing of bin Laden, with a Pakistan ambassador in one country insisting it was a joint operation and the high commissioner in another professing official ignorance.
This is a government on the run from its own people, equally terrified of inflaming public opinion and of losing the billions in American aid without which the economy would collapse.
Pakistan's military is not the world's finest. It has lost every war it has fought.
It is possible that even in a garrison town crawling with officers, no one questioned the towering compound.
It stretches credulity, however, to believe that the ISI did not know of it. Was bin Laden living under de facto state protection?
And what does the fact that we even have to ask tell us about Pakistan?
The Times
(source:theaustralian.com.au)
===============================================
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