Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Friday said that Taliban leader Mullah Omar and Al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden were both in Pakistan, charging that Islamabad’s support of militants had made Afghanistan unstable, while playing down reports that the Taliban was gaining strength inside his country. Addressing the US-based Council on Foreign Relations, Karzai said that the Taliban leader was “for sure” in Pakistan, adding that Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf “knows it and I know it . . . He is truly there”. | So is Hek, by the way. During the war against the Sovs, he spent most of his timesafe in Pak, canoodling with Qazi and plotting against Masood. |
| One day those lies are gonna catch up with Perv, and then he'll be no more. |
| Perv's not even trying to train his snakes. He's juggling them. |
| I've come to a number of conclusions on the mechanics of terrorism in the past year or so. One of them is that seeing only two main Islamic movements doesn't cover the facts. It's self-evidently true that Iran represents the Shia axis of terrorism. That's a problem that's not going to recede until Qom is rubble and all the lamp posts in Iran are adorned with dangling ayatollahs. Al-Qaeda is a major Sunni axis. It's run by Sunnis and funded by Soddies, and it has pretensions to establishing a world-wide Islamic caliphate. There are many tendrils there to be chased down, financing to be shut down, and a crunchy outer coating of decoys and sympathizers to be stripped away before we get to the chewy center of the Islamic high command, which is not located in Pakistan, but in Soddy Arabia, possibly in Riyadh but more likely in Asir. The third axis of terrorism in the world is Pakistan. It's not rogue elements of the ISI or illiterate, inbred hillbillies from the Great Wazoo, but the Pak government itself. Terrorism is a tactic and its use is a matter of government policy. No other interpretation holds water. Pakistan is a nation of little accomplishment on the international stage. Its army has never won a war. Its economy is primitive and without international charity it would collapse. It was founded on Islam and the Islam it's adopted is a particularly malevolent strain, with the Deobandis and the Wahhabis competing to see which can outdo the other in the realm of ostentatiously ferocious piety. The government exhibits a love of dissimulation, Great Gaming, and ill-advised puffery that would have Kipling hooting in recognition as all of his villains and precious few of his heroes parade across the political stage. Pak's ultimate goal is a Muslim Indian empire, stretching from the Burmese to the Persian borders, ruled by Punjabis from Islamabad. Qazi's articulated this vision, as has Hafiz Saeed. They'll no doubt argue over who gets the big turban when the subcontinental caliphate is finally established, but that's what they're working toward. Hafiz Saeed's Lashkar-e-Taiba is a tool of the Pakistani state. So is Hizbul Mujaheddin, owned and remotely operated by Qazi. So is Jaish-e-Muhammad. They are used to torment India, to attempt to keep it unstable, to keep the turbans stirred up. Kashmir is a tool to that end, a problem festering since 1947, intentionally designed to permit no solution. But even if there were a magical solution to the Kashmir problem tomorrow, LeT, JeM and whatever other proxy brigades were raised would continue their operations, booming trains in Mumbai and fostering riots in Gujarat, the ultimate intention being to subvert New Delhi. The Talibs on the western Pak border are precisely the same thing as the Kashmiri Krazed Killer Korps. They have the same weapons, the same tactics, the same ideology, and they train in the same camps. Islamabad engages in the same pattern of pious denial in both cases, the difference being that Fazl doesn't seem to be involved in Kashmir, nor Hafiz Saeed in Afghanistan. Karzai knows all this. The Pandjir Valley guys had their own intel back in the day, and presumably it's formed the basis of the national intel service. The Dari-speaking portion of Afghanistan is not stoopid, nor even as primitive as the Pashto-speaking portion. The U.S. government knows all this as well. If we can't miss it here at Rantburg, confined as we are to open source, it's doubtful they're going to miss it at Fort Meade or at Langley or at Bolling AFB. In the past year our relations with Pak have become more brittle as less and less of their story gets bought. The eye-rolling on the part of our military and diplo people becomes more obvious, less restrained, the mockery less subtle. At some point we've admitted that we know at the morning policy briefing, though not publicly. I don't think Perv realizes it yet, but it's guiding policy. That policy should by now include causing Pak to collapse into its mutually antagonistic component parts, with the ultimate goal of isolating and maybe even destroying the Punjabi megalomaniacs. Too bad about old Akbar Bugti, but only because he might have had some utility left in him. As far as I'm concerned, they're all expendable. |
