As Pakistan's uneasy coalition struggles with varying perspectives of its constituents on some major domestic issues, it finds itself confronted with a new challenge on the country's north-western border. It is the challenge of a threatened escalation of violence along the troubled tribal belt that separates Pakistan from Afghanistan. The spectre that looms large on it is not just the enemy called the Taliban but also Pakistan's Western partners in the war on terror. A cursory look at the Pakistani media would show that Pakistanis are as much concerned about the random acts of terror that bear the signature of the enemy as the threat of destabilsation posed by unilateral armed intrusions by friends into the Pakistani territory.
The question has gained fresh urgency because of a sequence of events that defies easy explanation. The backdrop is provided by Pakistan's desire to diversify its tactics so as to reduce dependence on military operations by working out peace agreements with the warlike tribes alienated by Islamabad's support for the US-led international coalition in Afghanistan. Washington has had serious reservations about this so-called policy shift as it fears that the Pakistani Taliban would use the reduction of Pakistan's military pressure to provide greater assistance to their Afghan counterparts. Pakistani diplomacy aims at addressing the anxieties of the West as well as those of the beleaguered Hamid Karzai regime.
Pakistan's foreign minister, Shah Mahmoud Qureshi, made it a point to hold detailed discussions with Karzai, Afghanistan's president, before a major international conference on Afghanistan got underway in Paris. His colleague from the Ministry of Interior, Rahman Malik, had made a separate effort to reassure the Karzai government of Pakistan's unstinted support. Just as these exchanges were heralding a continuity of the policy of standing by his regime, Karzai broke the rhythm of friendly conversations by holding a press conference in which he made an unprecedented declaration to the effect that his rather small and hitherto untested army would cross the international border and strike against targets inside Pakistan. By doing so, he certainly succeeded in shocking Pakistan's new political government that was bending over backwards to dispel the apprehensions that its policy review may be prejudicial to Kabul's interests.
What has added to the furore in Pakistan is that only a few days before Karzai's press conference, the United States' air force had carried out its most audacious attack on a Taliban contingent that had fought a grim battle inside Afghanistan and was allegedly disengaging from that battle and seeking sanctuary on the Pakistani soil. Unlike previous incursions, the heavy bombers obliterated a regular Pakistani post killing a major and 11 soldiers. The Pakistan army publicly called it a "cowardly and unprovoked attack". A former army chief of Pakistan who has generally supported collaboration with the United States in the fight against militancy and extremism told the New York Times that "this was the first time that the United States has deliberately targeted cooperating Pakistani forces". This grisly episode has got linked to Karzai's threat and created a widely shared perception that he had been tasked by Washington or Nato to raise the ante with a view to pressurising Pakistan to give up its new policy of entering into "peace deals" with amenable tribes.
For months now, the Western media has carried reports about American and Nato military commanders in Afghanistan demanding a widening of the war. There is a new tendency to describe the conflict as an Afghanistan-Pakistan war and attribute the failures in Afghanistan to the help that Afghan insurgents supposedly receive from the tribal strip of Pakistan.
Most of the ad hoc allegations made by the western media in recent months have now been reflected in a detailed study "Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan" by the National Defence Research Institute for the Rand Corporation.
In a section dealing with external support for the Taliban insurgency, this study focuses on two components: covert support from some officials in the Pakistan government notwithstanding the national policy to align with the Karzai regime and the freedom enjoyed by the Taliban to operate on Pakistani soil. It repeats the accusation made by Karzai's ministers from time to time that the Pakistani army deals resolutely with the Al Qaida elements but acts soft when it comes to the Taliban. This kind of analysis touches a raw nerve in Pakistan as its forces have suffered much heavier casualties in the last five years than either the American or Nato forces.
The Pakistan government is stuck between a rock and a hard place. It does not want to strain its cooperative relations with the United States. At the same time the general unpopularity of the "war on terror" is exacerbated by violations of Pakistan's sovereignty.
Difficult
Given the terrain and the ethnic configuration on both sides of the border it is difficult to maintain that the Taliban do not move across the notional border. Pakistan has now almost a thousand check posts but there are still ungoverned spaces that the insurgents can use for relief. The working assumption has been that Pakistan and the Coalition armies share intelligence all the time but when there is actionable intelligence the Pakistani forces act exclusively on their side of the frontier while Nato troops engage the enemy inside Afghanistan.
If Karzai is seeking to change this fundamental principle of collaboration by establishing hot pursuit as an operational choice he may well be opening the proverbial Pandora's Box. It will not improve things in Afghanistan but it will certainly become a factor of instability in Pakistan and that would not strengthen the cause of fighting the Afghan insurgency or Pakistan's own indigenous religious militancy. Compulsions of the election year in the United States complicate relations all around and the region faces a time of drift and uncertainty.
Tanvir Ahmad Khan is a former foreign secretary of Pakistan. He is currently working as the Director General of the Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad.
