"Pakistan and the US exit from Afghanistan", George Friedman's latest contribution to the free part of
Stratfor on-line, is so breath-takingly bad that it requires no commentary. Well, maybe just the penultimate paragraph:
Pakistan has every reason to [provide the cover for turning a US retreat into a negotiated settlement]. It needs the United States over the long term to balance against India. It must have a stable or relatively stable Afghanistan to secure its western frontier. It needs an end to US forays into Pakistan that are destabilizing the regime. And playing this role would enhance Pakistan’s status in the Islamic world, something the United States could benefit from, too. We suspect that all sides are moving toward this end.
The Taliban
hate their old masters in Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI). The ISI
hates the Americans. Any helping hand offered to the Americans will be interpreted by the "Islamic world" as further proof that Pakistan is a US proxy. India is going to be a world power eventually, which Pakistan will never be.
Apart from that, it's a great plan.
Posts
There are different deals which may be struck in Afghanistan, or at least in the southern tier of it, the Pukhtunistan part. Pakistan can and should be a part of any such deal with one or another factions of the Taliban in Kabul and certainly General Kayani must be gaming this one out with his corps commanders in happy anticipation of the US/Nato withdrawal.
ReplyDeletePakistan needs a deal in the Punjab as well, since it has many of the militant madrassas of the Kashmiri-oriented jihad groups. They have moved in the last year to show their power by ignoring worthless 'deals' with the Punjab authorities - the Mian brothers, Shahbaz and Sharif - and blowing up popular Barelvi/Sufi shrines like that of Data Sahib outside of Lahore as well as bombing selective targets within the city itself.
Kayani will be faced with difficulties on two fronts - the northern one with the Haqqani Talibs and the southern one where the old Kashmiri jihadis who carried out the Mumbai raid are still hoping to take over a position of power in the central province of Pakistan.
How he is going to address this problem is a great big question mark to which noone seems to have any immediate answer.
If you think that American military aid is not going to be a principal concern of Kayani in the near future, then I don't think you quite appreciate the position he is in. It is he who is the central player at this point in defending the rule of civil authority in Pakistan.
Would you like to work that up and permit me to post it?
ReplyDelete