Recently when he was in Afghanistan, the new US secretary of state Robert Gates visited a security post along the border with Pakistan where troops were demonstrating how they intercept attacks from Pakistan-based terror groups. Gates admitted that these attacks were increasing, particularly from North and South Wazirstan areas of Pakistan. Gates said that in December 2006, cross-border attacks (attacks launched from the Pakistani side of the Afghan-Pakistan border) had risen 200 per cent as much of the ‘command and control’ of Taliban continued to operate from ‘sanctuaries’ inside Pakistan.

‘It is a problem,’ he said as he added that tribal areas along the ‘Pakistani side’ of the border were home to ‘Al Qaeda networks.’ Still he went on to do the customary patting of the Pakistani dictator, Gen Pervez Musharraf for his role in the ‘war on terror’ and as a postscript he asked him ‘to do more’, another routine ‘advice’ from US officials to Musharraf that makes no impression on the latter.

As a member of the Republican cabinet, Gates has perhaps of necessity to sound diplomatic. But the US intelligence chief, John Negroponte, was less inhibited when he submitted a written statement to a Senate select committee, alleging that Al Qaeda ‘leaders’ were holed up in Pakistan. The reference obviously was to Osama bin Laden and his number two, Ayman Al Zawahari. In what is described as an unusually direct statement, Negroponte said that the top two of Al Qaeda were living in ‘a secure’ hideout in Pakistan. The Al Qaeda network, he said, was in the process of being rebuilt after it had been ‘decimated’ by the capture or killing of a large number of its members. Negroponte had no hesitation in saying that Pakistan was also a major source of Islamic extremism.

Almost all security analysts believe that the tribal region of Pakistan or its North West Frontier Province serve as the Al Qaeda hideout. The US had directly or indirectly launched at least two major air attacks, in January 2005 and October 2006, on the Bajaur tribal area of Pakistan while hunting for the fugitive Al Qaeda leaders. On both occasions there were heavy casualties but the Al Qaeda leaders had managed to escape and melt in friendly Pakistani territories.

US military officers have been saying for quite a while that much of the operational planning by the Pakistani created Taliban seeking to recapture Afghanistan is done inside Pakistan. Security experts have dropped the vague ‘Afghan-Pakistan border’ in preference for ‘inside Pakistan’ to describe the place where they think Osama bin Laden and his ilk are hiding. They have also openly accused Pakistan of turning a blind eye to insurgents bases located ‘inside’ Pakistani territories.

It is strange that the US continues to publicly ignore and refuses to take stern action against Pakistan on the more direct and blunt comments and reports from its intelligence community, security experts and defence analysts. Contrast this with what happened before Iraq was invaded. George W. Bush, the US president, and his colleagues would routinely quote ‘intelligence’ reports to tell the world that Saddam Hussein had developed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and was about to use them against the US and its allies. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair had gone a step ahead and spoken of an almost imminent attack from Iraq.

Those ‘intelligence’ reports were found to be bogus. They had looked implausible and contrived right from the start. But the charges against Pakistan by the intelligence and security experts are supported by plenty of circumstantial evidence and in view of happenings on the ground look very, very plausible, unlike the doctored intelligence dossiers on Iraq prepared to please the neo-cons in Washington.

Though ‘confessions’ by captured criminals are not given much credence, the charges levelled against Pakistan were freshly reinforced by someone alluded to as a ‘spokesman’ of the Taliban, Mohammed Hanif, captured by Afghan authorities along with two other men after they had entered the eastern province of Nangarhar from Pakistan. According to Hanif, Mullah Omar is hiding in Quetta where he is well protected by the ISI. He also said that Gul, the former ISI director, known in India as the father of Pakistan’s ‘low intensity’ war against India, was ‘actively’ supporting the Taliban, helping them train ‘suicide bombers’ at a Pakistani madrassah.

Gul, not unlike most of the Pakistani establishment, including military and police officials, seems to believe that extremism is the best ‘guarantee’ against all kinds of real and imaginary threats from outside. The Pakistanis are not willing to give up the concept that Afghanistan must serve as the western frontier of their ‘strategic depth’ so that they can concentrate their military might on the eastern border with India where their agenda is to destabilise and dismember the country.

The Western mollycoddling of Pakistan, particularly Musharraf, does not irk Afghanistan or India alone. The people of Pakistan themselves seem to be unhappy with it; at least the political class is. In the six years that he has held power after overthrowing an elected government, Musharraf has subverted all the democratic institutions in his country and installed nearly 1000 military officers in key civilian posts. He goes back on ‘assurances’ without any qualms. He is now preparing to get himself elected for another five-year term without fulfilling his promise that he would doff his uniform.

And yet, President Bush and others think they can win the ‘war on terror’ with the help of a man they know as General Pervez Musharraf.

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