The ISI intends to use the Taliban for suppressing its domestic secular separatists in Baluchistan, waging war against India in Kashmir and regaining control of its own ungoverned Pashtun tribal areas.
The US-Pakistan strategic dialogue, the third bilateral summit, ended recently with the US pledge to increase aid for Pakistan's military by $2 billion. The US urged its ''ally'' to crack down on the extremist militants in north Waziristan. The uncomfortable truth is that in a void of morality, the Pakistani military declares that by taking on the Afghan Taliban it would be pushing Pakistan over a precipice of disintegration.
Such claims are grounded on a flimsy pretext. The collusion between the Pakistani military and the Taliban reveals Pakistan's long-standing strategy of using religious extremists for geopolitical interests. The point of this strategy is to cut deals with the Taliban, with the proviso that the Pakistani military spy agency (ISI) would back the al-Qaeda affiliated Taliban as long as they crossed the border and kept fighting inside Afghanistan.
With the help of three pro-Pakistani leaders of the Afghan insurgency - Mullah Omar, Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar - widely believed to be hiding in Pakistan under ISI protection, the Pakistani military is involved in blocking any deal between the Taliban and Kabul.
Advertisement: Story continues below After the West quits the region, Pakistan will turn Afghanistan into its dumping ground. Several Pakistani home-grown terrorist groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba have already moved their operatives from Kashmir to Afghanistan. The ISI intends to use the Taliban for suppressing its domestic secular separatists in Baluchistan, waging war against India in Kashmir and regaining control of its own ungoverned Pashtun tribal areas.
The ISI also posits strengthening the mediaeval ideology of Talibanisation so it could regenerate the Islamic militancy.
Pakistan's 63-year history tells it all. Since the demise of eastern Pakistan and the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971, Pakistan's military and the ruling political elite have become increasingly paranoid about the future of Pakistan's Pashtun belt, which was coercively cobbled together with the country's shaky ethnic patchwork by the British when they retreated from the subcontinent. Since then, Pakistan's secular power structure, founded by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the country's first Anglophile governor-general, has begun to transform into an alliance of mullahs and generals.
The Soviet Union's decade-long occupation of Afghanistan (1978-1989) gave Pakistan excellent opportunities for revenge against the Afghan encouragement of a breakaway Pashtunistan and refusal to recognise the British-drawn border known as the Durand Line between the countries. This is one of the most disputed borders in the world.
At the height of the Cold War, Pakistan radicalised tens of thousands of young Muslims by creating several irreconcilable anti-Western extremists who are now fighting the West in Afghanistan and elsewhere. With the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan, the ISI created a more lethal generation of Islamic militancy, the Taliban.
When the Taliban swarmed into Kabul in 1994, Pakistani generals celebrated the occasion and boasted that they pushed the Durand Line northward to Amu Darya, in the heart of Central Asia.
Much of what is going on in Pakistan under the hyped-up rhetoric of war on terrorism discloses the country's war against anti-state and separatist movements. Extremist militants regularly target ethnic and religious minorities. The Sunni and Shiite division is widening.
In Karachi, violence between minority Pashtuns and Sindhis is mounting. In Baluchistan, a full-blown separatist war is taking ground. In the Pashtun tribal belt, extremism has been transforming into separatism.
Such ethnic, religious and separatist violence that has cost thousands of lives is echoing the communal war of 1947 that led to Pakistan's creation.
It is a wonky way for the US and its allies to depend only on Pakistan for winning the war. A tougher strategy is required to loosen the ISI's reins on the Taliban.
The US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation helped rescue Afghanistan from the ISI in 2001 and there is growing anxiety among Afghans that the West might allow Afghanistan to fall back into the lap of the ISI once they walk away.
Dr Ehsan Azari Stanizai, who was born in Afghanistan, is an adjunct fellow with the University of Western Sydney writing and society research group
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/a-wonky-way-for-the-us-to-win-the-war-20101102-17c9e.html
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