State of the Islamic Republic

QUETTA, Pakistan — The most explosive question about the Taliban resurgence here along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is this: Have Pakistani intelligence agencies been promoting the Islamic insurgency?

The government of Pakistan vehemently rejects the allegation and insists that it is fully committed to help American and NATO forces prevail against the Taliban militants who were driven from power in Afghanistan in 2001.

Western diplomats in both countries and Pakistani opposition figures say that Pakistani intelligence agencies — in particular the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence and Military Intelligence — have been supporting a Taliban restoration, motivated not only by Islamic fervor but also by a longstanding view that the jihadist movement allows them to assert greater influence on Pakistan’s vulnerable western flank.

More than two weeks of reporting along this frontier, including dozens of interviews with residents on each side of the porous border, leaves little doubt that Quetta is an important base for the Taliban, and found many signs that Pakistani authorities are encouraging the insurgents, if not sponsoring them.

“Have Pakistani intelligence agencies been promoting the Islamic insurgency?” Of course they have. They’ve been doing so ever since the CIA first funneled money through the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency to the Mujahadeen, funds which eventually found their way to one Osama bin Laden. Nothing new, and not the last time either:

U.S. Department of State Report, “Pakistan-Afghanistan Relations,”
circa January 1996, Confidential, 4 pp.
Source: Freedom of Information Act Release to the National Security Archive.

In this summary, the Department of State reports on Afghanistan-Pakistan relations, including the impact each state has on the stability of the other. The report discusses the effects of arms and narco-trafficking–lawlessness, creation of an arms culture, and bombings and assassinations in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP)– foreign interference in Afghanistan from India, Iran, Pakistan, and Russia, and concludes with U.S. views and policy interests vis-à-vis Afghanistan. According to the State Department summary Pakistan does “not have a well-conceived end-game for their policy of supporting the Taliban and opposing [Afghan interim President Barnahuddin] Rabbani.”

I’ve found a new focus here at Mccs1977. Although it will not become an exclusively single issue blog, Afghanistan and the piece of the puzzle it represents will be a major topic here for some time. How Afghanistan relates to Iraq is one; in current operations, and lessons that should have been learned…

Why did the United States Soviet Union spend ten years, billions of dollars and 15-20,000 lives trying to prop up a government that seemed constantly on the verge of collapse? Was Washington’s Moscow’s intervention, as some have claimed, originally part of a grand design to seize oil fields and warm water ports in the Persian Gulf region, or merely a move to protect a new Democratic socialist government in a country contiguous to its sensitive Iranian southern border?