Pakistan's ambigeous policy leads to attacks

Washington Post:

For the past five years, Pakistan has pursued a risky, two-sided policy toward Islamic militancy, positioning itself as a major ally in the Western-led war against global terrorism while reportedly allowing homegrown Muslim insurgent groups to meddle in neighboring India and Afghanistan.

Now, two high-profile cases of terrorism -- a day of gruesome, sophisticated train bombings in India in mid-July and a plot foiled this month to blow up planes leaving Britain for the United States -- have cast a new spotlight on Pakistan's ambiguous, often starkly contradictory roles as both a source and suppressor of Islamic violence, according to Pakistani and foreign experts.

Moreover, increasing evidence of links between international attacks and groups long tolerated or nurtured in Pakistan, including the Taliban and Kashmiri separatists, are making it difficult for the military-led government here to reconcile its policy of courting religious groups at home while touting its anti-terrorist credentials abroad.

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The basic problem for Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is that he is trying to please two irreconcilable groups. Abroad, the leader of this impoverished Muslim country is frantically competing with arch-rival India, a predominantly Hindu country, for American political approval and economic ties. To that end, he has worked hard to prove himself as a staunch anti-terrorism ally.

But at home, where he hopes to win election in 2007 after eight years as a self-appointed military ruler, Musharraf needs to appease Pakistan's Islamic parties to counter strong opposition from its secular ones. He also needs to keep alive the Kashmiri and Taliban insurgencies on Pakistan's borders to counter fears within military ranks that India, which has developed close ties with the Kabul government, is pressuring its smaller rival on two flanks.

"It is clear that our current policy of stout denial fools nobody," columnist Irfan Husain wrote in the Dawn newspaper last Saturday. By allowing Islamic militant groups to flourish while seeking praise for helping to break up the plot in Britain, he said, Pakistani officials are "determined to see only one side of the coin," but "the rest of the world is bent on examining the other side very closely indeed."

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Musharraf's strattle is running out of time. Pakistan is now the source of much of the world's terrorism and his ability to avoid confrontation is failing. While he apparently chose sides after 9-11 and wrote off the Taliban in Afghanistan, he still has not written them off in the tribal areas where they and al Qaeda still have a sanctuary of sorts. Despite the Bush doctrine, the US has not pushed him as hard as it should to either clean out these areas or let the US and NATO do it. Until they are cleaned out there will continue to be plots spawned in the area for worldwide mayhem.