Author: Jim Hoagland
Publication: The Washington Post
Date: January 22, 2006
URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/20/AR2006012001656.html
Death to America. Oh, wait. Thank you, America.
Love you, big guy. No, hold on. Where's that "Death to America"
banner? What have they done for us lately?
Pakistani mobs are back in the streets denouncing
American military strikes aimed at terrorists sheltering in Pakistan. The
carefully staged fury of those mobs eclipses the public opinion polls of a
few weeks ago reporting significant gratitude from Pakistanis for U.S. military
help after a catastrophic earthquake.
Easy come, easy go? Not exactly. The suffering
villagers expressing gratitude have not suddenly morphed into the well-fed,
bearded zealots marching in Peshawar. But in Pakistan, public opinion and
the government's reactions to U.S. help -- and U.S. hurt -- are highly volatile
and zoom to extremes. That volatility in turn underlines the unsteady course
of the Bush administration's effort to eliminate al Qaeda and its Taliban
allies.
In its tangled relations with Pakistan, Washington
rides something far more dangerous than an opinion roller coaster. President
Pervez Musharraf's military regime is the most difficult government in the
world to fit into Washington's struggle against Islamic extremist groups.
Pakistan is essential and helpful in fighting
the al Qaeda network -- except when it is not. Without Musharraf's help, the
United States and its NATO allies cannot put down the rebellion in Afghanistan
being waged by Osama bin Laden's fanatics and the Taliban. Without Musharraf's
complicity, that rebellion could not continue at its increasingly murderous
intensity. We've got Musharraf right where he wants us.
Washington and Islamabad are condemned to
such strategic ambivalence. Each is unable to do without the other, while
wishing it could. That is the political context for the continuing fallout
from the unacknowledged U.S. missile strike aimed at al Qaeda bigwigs in the
Pakistani village of Damadola on Jan. 13 -- an incident that looms large in
Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz's visit to Washington this week.
The Hellfire missiles aimed from a Predator
drone at the bin Laden operatives gathering in Damadola also carried a badly
needed message for Musharraf and his intelligence chiefs, who helped create
both al Qaeda and Afghanistan's Taliban: The sanctuary those groups have been
granted in Pakistan's remote tribal lands on the Afghan frontier now exceeds
the limits of strategic ambiguity.
Suicide bombings and attacks with roadside
explosive devices directed at U.S. and NATO troops as well as Afghan authorities
have spiked upward in recent months. U.S. intelligence reports to the Pakistanis
on terrorist locations and movements along the frontier have received no effective
response from Pakistani authorities during this damaging terrorist upsurge.
"You can draw the Afghan-Pakistan border
on a map by looking at the pattern of signal intercepts," says one U.S.
official. "The bad guys chatter away in Pakistan, feeling they are safe.
That area lights up like a Christmas tree. Then they go silent when they cross
into Afghanistan, where they fear getting hit."
The aerial strike on Damadola, which is four
miles inside Pakistan, killed as many as four al Qaeda chiefs, Pakistani officials
concede. Villagers have reported 18 deaths, including some women and children.
Musharraf is happy to have Washington bear the entire blame in Pakistani opinion
for the reports of collateral damage.
But the story, and the moral burden it involves,
seems to be more complicated. The Damadola raid followed by a week a little-noticed
assault on the Pakistani village of Saidgi in North Waziristan, where residents
described helicopter-borne foreign troops grabbing suspects and flying them
back to Afghanistan.
Two limited, carefully planned border attacks
in rapid succession would appear to be something more than accidents of opportunity.
The escalation by terrorists in Afghanistan has been met with an escalation,
still at a low level, in U.S. attacks on Pakistani soil. Musharraf's failure
to curb the terrorist forays into Afghanistan after the incursion at Saidgi
conceivably led to the attack on Damadola and the death of innocents there.
The Bush administration is still improvising
in its attempts to "enable and encourage" other countries to join
its global strategy of counterterrorism. It needs to draw its European and
Asian allies that are helping fight the terrorist networks in Afghanistan
into a coordinated approach of pressures and incentives for the hugely important,
and hugely dangerous, country of Pakistan.
And Washington needs to hold Musharraf's feet
to the fire on al Qaeda and the Taliban, even as it tries to bolster him at
home. Whatever else it did or did not accomplish, the Damadola raid surely
demonstrated to the Pakistani president that he, too, has much to lose if
the terror festival in Afghanistan continues to be run unhindered from Pakistani
soil.
jimhoagland@washpost.com
