Destabilisation of region continues

If the unrest that has steadily spiralled in South Waziristan is anything to go by, then UN Special Envoy to Afghanistan Paddy Ashdown, who talks of engaging the Taliban, must add Pakistan to his new job description. One is meaningless without the other. More so now that the Taliban-Al Qaida have borrowed a leaf from Pakistan's strategy of using Afghanistan as a strategic depth against old enemy India.

Except, the Taliban-Al Qaida use it in reverse. And their enemy is the state that spawned it in the first place. "They see an enemy at home," Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Daniel Markey said of the militants. "The apparatus of the Pakistani state has turned from their protector and their supplier to an enemy, or at least an authority that is not theirs."

The shock capture of first, army-held Sararogha then Chagmalai Fort, by the Taliban in Pakistan's unruly north-west, is a measure of the authorities' inability to quell the rising extremist quotient. The threat to inherently unstable states like Pakistan and Afghanistan is both internal and external as more than ever the Taliban-Al Qaida footprint straddles the Hindukush and beyond. The stated aim of these groups is the expulsion of all foreign forces from the region and the imposition of Sharia.

The unstated? Destabilisation, in a shadowy war where aims and goals overlap, the man who wields his army issue weapon or the Taliban issue Kalashnikov - a gun for hire knows not whether he has the enemy who tilts towards western ideology in his gunsights or someone who shares his ethnic ancestry. What's clear is that the conflict has already completely and unnecessarily claimed the life of one hapless woman leader. It could claim the lives of others before the last democratic impulses are snuffed out once and for all and a military-led regime with a democratic patina is put in place to fight the "good" fight against a conveniently contrarian dispensation that can become yet another spoke in the "axis of evil".

Promise

The CIA has now thrown its weight behind Islamabad's theory that fighters allied to Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud organised Benazir Bhutto's killing. Why Bhutto - who only promised to take up US cudgels - died and the Chaudhrys of Gujrat and their mentor the Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf who actually wage America's war in the tribal areas survive, defies logic.

The move to woo Pakistan's lesser grass-roots party, the Nawaz Sharif-led Pakistan Muslim League, is part of the game to find an acceptable democratic face to head the Muslim state, which the Bush administration, faced with less than a year to craft a new legacy, is hoping to dust off as its only foreign policy success. This, hoping the world will gloss over its selective treatment of regimes in the region - Myanmar, Bangladesh, Pakistan - where the lip service they pay to democracy beyond their shores, is justified at the altar of their strategic objectives.

Ducking the question

But Bush is taking a huge gamble in Pakistan-Afghanistan, where Washington's enemies are proving difficult to subdue. The international community - not their governments - has a measure of the problem even as immediate neighbour Delhi ducks the question. Think tanks, strategists, analysts worldwide have all come to the inescapable conclusion that just as Afghanistan is being actively retaken by the Taliban-Al Qaida and the most brazen of attacks on the Aga Khan-built Serena hotel in the centre of Kabul is just one more example of the reach of the extremists, it is Waziristan and specifically the town of Mir Ali that is the new staging ground of terror.

Washington's concern is that the Pakistan army is not doing enough to fight the growing menace is code for the fact that Islamabad is reluctant to pit the core of its fighting machine against the Taliban irregulars. Instead, the British-created nineteenth century Frontier Corps and the various militias that come under that umbrella have been deployed. To little effect. The reason for the mass surrenders is because the tribal militia are part of the same Pashtun gene pool as those that fight under the Taliban black flag.

Indeed, even if they do throw the might of the well-oiled Punjab-based army against the Taliban, it's questionable they will succeed. US Defence Secretary Robert Gates' statement that Nato troops were clearly unequal to the task of counter-insurgency in Afghanistan which has set off its own ripples within Nato forces with Canada in particular taking umbrage, and a planned dispatch of 3,200 additional Marines to southern Afghanistan is an acknowledgement that Nato too has failed on the other side of the Durand Line.

As have the earlier avatars - the International Stabilisation and Assistance Force (ISAF) set up in 2001 to help a war- torn Afghanistan get back on its feet and Operation Enduring Freedom to fight Taliban remnants.

As Musharraf plans to start a four-day visit to Europe today, and all the attendant publicity blitz that will focus on the unstable Waziristans, an enemy in the Hindukush will be an all too convenient campaign tool for the Republican Party campaign. Do the simplistic Sharifs know the pitfalls of playing this complicated game?

Neena Gopal is an analyst on Asia.