Disorder on the Pakistan border

Carlotta Gall and David Rohde reporting in the New York Times tell a story which has to raise even more questions as to whether Afghanistan can ever be secured without first dealing with Pakistan. Quetta, on the Pakistan side of the border was a major staging and marshaling area for al Qaeda before the invasion of Afghanistan and for the Taliban before that.

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.

The ISI has long been suspected of not only being in league with the Taliban but using them as a surrogate army.

The ISI has a long history of dealings with the Taliban. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan the ISI was the conduit for money and arms, supplied by the US, destined for the mujahadeen. The ISI flew its true colours when, in September 2006, a deal was reached between the Pakistani government and the Taliban lodged in Waziristan. Shortly after that deal was signed NATO and the US operations in Afghanistan reported that the number of attacks by Taliban (or similar groups) tripled.

The Pakistani military and intelligence services have for decades used religious parties as a convenient instrument to keep domestic political opponents at bay and for foreign policy adventures, said Husain Haqqani, a former adviser to several of Pakistan’s prime ministers and the author of a book on the relationship between the Islamists and the Pakistani security forces.

The religious parties recruited for the jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan from the 1980s, when the Pakistani intelligence agencies ran the resistance by the mujahedeen and channeled money to them from the United States and Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Mr. Haqqani said.

In return for help in Kashmir and Afghanistan the intelligence services would rig votes for the religious parties and allow them freedom to operate, he said.

“The religious parties provide them with recruits, personnel, cover and deniability,” Mr. Haqqani said in a telephone interview from Washington, where he is now a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The Inter-Services Intelligence once had an entire wing dedicated to training jihadis, he said. Today the religious parties probably have enough of their own people to do the training, but, he added, the I.S.I. so thoroughly monitors phone calls and people’s movements that it would be almost impossible for any religious party to operate a training camp without its knowledge.

“They trained the people who are at the heart of it all, and they have done nothing to roll back their protégés,” Mr. Haqqani said.

In the region surrounding Quetta, the people are of the firm belief that the ISI is sending fresh recruits to the war in Afghanistan. And when the question arises as to whether the ISI is a loose cannon all answers are the same: President Musharraf has total control of the ISI.

Musharraf, of course, has his own problems. He lives life on the brink of a coup. At any time, a move which upsets any given power group, such as the ISI, could see him removed from power. Is that forcing him to play both ends against the middle?

Probably.

The real problem is that there are troops on the ground in Afghanistan who have every right to believe they are accomplishing something, only to discover that their enemy is being reinforced from an area they cannot enter.

That would piss me off.