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Pakistan's deep political and military links with the Taliban are coming home to roost. Pakistan Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar's visits to the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States are turning out to be diplomatic minefields with the leader being subjected to pointed scrutiny.
In another significant development, Russia has clarified that Pakistan cannot qualify for membership of Shanghai-5, a grouping of five countries that includes Russia and China, because it supports terrorism.
"How can Islamabad that aids and abets international terrorism, religious extremism and drug trafficking become a member of the Shanghai forum aiming at combating these evils," said Mikhail Margilov, deputy chairman of the international affairs committee of the Federation Council, the Upper House of Russian Parliament.
"It is the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan that poses great threat to the security and stability of Central Asian countries, forming the southern flank of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)," Margilov told Russian channel NTV in the wake of the forum's summit that began Thursday.
"And the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the breeding ground for international terrorism and drugs trafficking, survives, thanks to Pakistani support," he added.
Mr Sattar's arrival in Ottawa, meanwhile, coincided with a highly critical Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) report that Pakistani immigrants were tending to "import extremist tendencies" and that the country's backing of terrorist organisations was creating a problem for Canada.
Mr Sattar met the Canadian foreign affairs establishment and will be in the United States on Saturday.
The CSIS report notes that "many of Canada's security preoccupations originate abroad, making it imperative to identify and comprehend developments which could become 'homeland issues' for residents or citizens of Canada who belong to one of country's ethnic communities."
The CSIS has recommended that "we must ensure that Canada does not become the originating country for the support or direction of an incident abroad.
"A hardening attitude and a willingness on the part of certain terrorist organisations to directly support terrorist operations in North America reinforce the belief that Canadians, now more than ever, are potential venue for terrorist attacks," the CSIS says.
But, if Ottawa has proved to be as probing as London, Washington also has a some queries over Pakistan's links with the Taliban. The US Senate's non-binding resolution, authored by Democrat Representative Eliot L Engel, condemning the Taliban's "Hindu" edict, also called upon Pakistan "to use its influence with the Taliban regime" to demand they "revoke the reprehensible policy of forcing Afghan Hindus and other non-Muslims to wear a yellow identity symbol".
Representative Tom Lantos, a ranking minority member of the powerful House International Relations Committee, said he would aggressively pursue Washington's concern over Pakistan's support for the Taliban when Mr Sattar meets US Secretary of State Colin Powell and members of the Congress. "We cannot allow the Taliban to systematically repress its Hindus in such an eerily similar manner," he said
Mr Sattar is carrying a special letter of friendship from Pakistan's military ruler and Chief Executive Gen Pervez Musharraf for US President George W Bush. In Washington, the Foreign Minister, besides holding discussions with his counterpart Secretary Colin Powell, will meet US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and the Members of the US House Committee on International Relations and the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Mr Sattar's important tour of the United Kingdom, Canada and the US is hardly going off as the Pakistan foreign policy establishment would have hoped for. Pakistan's backing of Taliban, which it has sustained and whose fighters it channels into Jammu and Kashmir, seems to have turned a full circle. With the Taliban emerging as the ideological and material benefactor of fundamentalist Islam, Pakistan's role in nurturing this volatile cocktail in south Asia is now becoming all too evident.
Interestingly, the Canadian report notes that the threat of a terrorist attack against Canadians is higher now than it has ever been before, and the agency has identified Islamic extremism as a top security concern. "The protracted Indo-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir, featuring periodic open warfare and Pakistan-backed insurgent activity, continues to be a major concern," the report states.
The report emphasises the spill-over "effects of ongoing support by Pakistan's intelligence apparatus of the Jammu and Kashmir conflict, with its growing linkage to the Taliban", the Islamic militia that rules most of Afghanistan, and into expatriate communities around the world. It identifies Islamic extremism as "one of the prime sources of terrorism today" and adds that "they are united in their commitment to use serious violence to effect political change and are willing to attack soft targets anywhere in the world."
While, Mr Sattar receives homilies from his western hosts, in Islamabad, the US and the European Union have intensified their pressure on Pakistan to modify its policy to accommodate other Afghan groups "inside and outside" Afghanistan, according to newspaper reports.
The European Union (EU) and American policy-makers believe Pakistan could and should stiffen its attitude towards Taliban to force them "massage the world community's concerns on human rights, women rights, education and health."
There is a degree of concern in
Pakistan that once the Taliban occupies the whole of Afghanistan they will
turn either to central Asian states or to their southern neighbour.
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