Getting Pakistan to focus on the real threat

NY Times:

...

... as Taliban and other insurgents have battled government troops closer and closer to Islamabad, the one thing that no one seemed to be talking about publicly is the one thing that, privately, Obama officials acknowledge is the most important: how to get the Pakistani government and army to move the country’s troops from the east, where they are preoccupied with a war with India that most American officials do not think they will have to fight, to the west, where the Islamist insurgents are taking over one town after another.

Mr. Obama gave only passing reference to the problem, which American officials have been privately pressing their Pakistani counterparts to address all week. Standing next to the visiting heads of state of Afghanistan and Pakistan — Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari — Mr. Obama said simply that “we meet today as three sovereign nations joined by a common goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda and its extremist allies in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their ability to operate in either country in the future.”

Then he went on to talk about the drug trade in Afghanistan and the $5.5 billion raised for the region at a donors’ conference in Tokyo.

Part of the reason for the gap between the public and private diplomacy is that administration officials do not want to go on the record explicitly with what they are seeking from the two governments, less they be held to account when neither government comes through with promises made behind closed doors.

The other reason why no one wants to talk too much publicly about what the United States wants Pakistan to do is that there is a real difference in the way that the two countries view the insurgency in the western part of Pakistan. While Americans see this as an existential threat to the Pakistani government, Pakistanis look at things differently.

“This situation has been going on for decades,” one Pakistani official explained on Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity. “These people have always tried to impose Shariah law in the tribal areas.”

Pakistan is more concerned, he said, with getting the American government to stop the unmanned Predator strikes in the western part of the country, which he characterized as far more damaging to the survivability of the Pakistani government than Islamist insurgents in the Swat valley.

...

Asking the US to stop the UAV attacks shows just how delusional some people in Pakistan's government are. Those attacks are killing the people trying to destroy the Pakistan government and allowing them to live is not going to change that objective. They are also destroying people who are trying to kill our forces in Afghanistan and not fighting back against them makes no sense.

What does make sense and what is required to defeat the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies is increasing the force to space ratio in the area the Taliban are trying to dominate. That means moving troops to where the real threat is. Since India views the Taliban as an enemy too, it would make sense for it to give Pakistan assurances that it will not take advantage of a troop movement by Pakistan to fight a common enemy.