Monday, June 16, 2008

NWFP: part of Pakistan or not?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7456019.stm

"Afghanistan has the right of self-defence. When [militants] cross the territory from Pakistan to come and kill Afghans and to kill coalition troops it exactly gives us the right to go back and do the same."

What was President Karzai thinking? That is so obviously not true. According to Pakistanis, they should be able to attack India and invade Kashmir at will, and attack Afghanistan non-stop from the NWFP; but should one American bomb land in Pakistan their sovereignty as a nation has been foully desecrated. They are enormously delicate in their sensitivities to any slight to their nation, while utterly disinterested in the sensitivities of its neighbors. For how much longer this will be tolerated, I'm not sure.

India, growing daily in industrial might and international leverage, sees on its doorstep a shambolic, aggressive nuclear-armed teenager. Afghanistan, a fragile and virtually non-nation nation, sees on its doorstep an opportunist bully fighting itself and everyone else with no regard to the consequences. Both see the nuclear weapons in Pakistan's arsenal as the magical pass-card that allows them to punch so far above their puny weight. For the US, now that Iraq is emerging into proper state-hood, the focus of its gaze will inevitably move on to the two remaining sources of large-scale Islamist power- Iran and Pakistan.

So do you do the easy things first or the difficult ones? Iran currently doesn't have nuclear weapons, and has only second-rate conventional weapons. Taking out their Nuclear sites and the economic and political assets of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard would be relatively easy; removing the big toys from the Pakistanis could be quite messy, and would almost certainly have repercussions in countries like Britain with very large Pakistani minorities. Saying that, it has to be done. Pakistan is a permanent threat to further nuclear proliferation, being one country which has a known and dishonourable record in that regard. Who knows where Pakistani Nuclear know-how will end up next?

At least one thing is becoming clearer- the government of Pakistan is moving away from Musharrafs 'forked-tongue' diplomacy, which involved making a huge amount of pro-US noise while doing virtually none of the things asked of him; towards a plain anti-US, pro-Islamist posture. That will make the eventual conflict much more politically palatable on Capitol Hill and in Parliament. And I do believe it is inevitable. The Pakistani government is responsible for the NWFP, the men who plot their terror ops there, and the Taleban pseudo-army whose staging areas are there. Either that or the NWFP is not part of Pakistan, and the US can get on with destroying its enemies in it. Can't have it both ways guys.

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