Question for Ahmed Rashid on Taliban in Pakistan
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Hamid Karzai paid a three-day visit to Islamabad in mid-February. He had a bill of particulars that he delivered to Pervez Musharraf that was quite accusatory of Pakistan.
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http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=32&ItemID=10050
The Afghans have been making accusations for several years now that the Taliban are all living in Pakistan, the leadership is here, and that the logistics is based, the recruiting, everything is being done from here, and it’s being done by the Pakistan government. This has been very strongly denied by the Pakistan government. What Karzai brought this time was he brought dossiers of Afghan intelligence reports giving names and addresses and telephone numbers of people along the frontier who are involved in this Taliban resurgence. Karzai then spoke to the press and said he had given these dossiers, without giving the details of exactly what was in them.
Right after that—and this is just before the Bush visit to Pakistan, in fact, while President Bush was in India—President Musharraf got extremely angry and gave a press conference in which he blasted Karzai and said that they had checked out all the intelligence and it was all nonsense, and he accused Karzai of maligning Pakistan and of being in league with India, Pakistan’s long-time enemy. Of course, the politics behind all this was that President Bush had visited Kabul and had then gone on to India. And it seems that Karzai had made his move in order to try to impress the Americans to take sides with Afghanistan vis-à-vis Pakistan. So this is what angered Musharraf.
And Bush then arrived in Pakistan, spent a day here, did not take sides but did question whether Musharraf was as committed to the war on terrorism as he had been in the past. From the Pakistani point of view, that visit went very badly. And the Pakistanis are now, of course, blaming Karzai for why Bush’s visit went so badly. But whatever the politics of that may be, the truth is that there is enormous tension between the two countries, there are these accusations flying back and forth. Clearly the Afghans are very, very upset at the fact that a lot of this Taliban resurgence, as they see it, is coming from Pakistan.
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Let’s talk a bit about President Bush’s visit to Pakistan. Several editorial comments here have described it as humiliating and a snub to Pakistan in the sense that India, where Bush had visited just prior to his visit to Islamabad, was offered a sweetheart deal, effectively allowing it to do an end run around the Nonproliferation Treaty and to develop its nuclear program whereas Pakistan was offered no such carrot.
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Absolutely. That is what happened. The visit to Pakistan, as I said, went extremely badly. The Americans had nothing to offer Pakistan. There was the hope that there would be a joint investment treaty, but even that didn’t happen. Clearly, this enormous deal that the Americans have struck with the Indians has upset the Pakistanis greatly. Pakistan is also a nuclear power and wanted a similar deal. That was not going to be possible, given the extraordinary proliferation of nuclear technology that Pakistan has done in the past under its former head of nuclear power, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan.
Again, the background politics is that the Americans had told the Pakistanis several months ago that there was no way they were going to get a similar deal, and did they want Bush to visit Pakistan even though there was no such deal. And the Pakistanis said, Yes, we still want Bush to visit Pakistan, and we hope that something else can be done or you could give something else or you could sign an investment treaty. The problem for Musharraf is that nothing was done. And the visit went down like a lead balloon and has been very much criticized here in Pakistan and has been criticized abroad, too.
The problem is that Musharraf faces a large slate of domestic problems. When Bush arrived, in contrast to India, the whole of Islamabad was shut down, people were taken off the streets, there were thousands of troops and security people. And just the day before, an American diplomat had been killed in a suicide bombing in Karachi, which, of course, heightened the security concerns for Bush. So everything that could possibly go wrong for this visit did go wrong.