Author: Tunku Varadarajan
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: July 31, 2010
URL: http://www.dailypioneer.com/272797/Pakistan-a-double-dealing-nation.html
The United States must demand that Pakistan
state unequivocally whether it is "with us or against us". For nearly
a decade now, their caveat-linked policy has cost America untold harm, billions
of dollars and hundreds of dead citizens.
The latest gaudy gush from WikiLeaks will
leave the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department soggy and irritable
for many days. But one aspect of the leak-that concerning Pakistan's brazenly
unstinting support for the insurgency in Afghanistan - should be news to absolutely
no one.
In fact, one might say that the one good thing
to come out of this latest leak -a thing so good that it is worth the "collateral
damage" to the US from everything else - is that it could spell the end
of Pakistan's repulsive double game. This is a game in which that country
takes billions of dollars of our aid money (money paid, in part, in taxes
by the kin of American soldiers killed by the Taliban) and then blithely,
devilishly, mendaciously stabs us in the back by arming, protecting, financing,
hiding, and advising the same forces against whom this country is at war.
We pay them money so that they can help our enemies kill us.
Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador in Washington,
is essentially a decent man. He has, by instinct and by inclination, no truck
with the malign men in khaki who run Pakistan's Army. But watch him over the
next few days as he contorts himself before the press, prevaricating, offering
us canned lies, nuggets of tergiversation scripted in Islamabad. Don't buy
a word of it. And if the White House does buy from him, be sure to read the
subtext of the purchase agreement. Above all, be skeptical -aggressively skeptical.
We are now at a crossroads with Pakistan,
a point at which we need to pull out old words from the Bush playbook. It
is time to state to them - to state, in particular, to Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani,
the Pakistan Army's chief of staff - that Pakistan is either with us, or against
us. There can be no caveats, no exit clauses, no fine print, no weasely handwringing
about Pakistan's need to retain "strategic balance" in Afghanistan.
Much of the latest involvement in the Afghan
insurgency by the ISI -Pakistan's military intelligence - happened on Gen
Kayani's watch, when he was the head of the ISI. That very same man, Kayani,
whose agency lovingly breastfed the Taliban, and who was later elevated to
chief of army staff, has just been granted a three-year extension by Pakistan's
civilian government. It boggles the mind that this duplicitous underminer
of the U.S. war effort is now General David Petraeus' direct interlocutor.
Petraeus will need to navigate a labyrinth of misinformation and half-truths,
accompanied by typically unctuous protestations that Pakistan is doing everything
it can to help us in the war against al-Qaeda. (Readers will not have missed
Hillary Cinton's tart remarks, last week, in which she said on television
that "someone" in the Pakistan government must, surely, know where
Osama bin Laden is.)
My sense is that the latest leaks will have
broad repercussions of an ungovernable variety. But of one result I'd like
to be certain: that the White House will now read the riot act to Pakistan,
squeezing hard, if need be- and I mean this somewhat metaphorically - on the
double-dealing epaulettes of Gen Kayani. Pakistan is either with us, or against
us. Right now, as I see things -leaks and all - it is resoundingly, irrefutably
against us.
- With permission from The Daily Beast
- The author is a columnist
