I've hoped the Pakistanis will finally realize that this is a fight to the death with their jihadis, so the government had best start acting like it. Of course, the divisions within their country and armed forces make it difficult for the government and army to sustain efforts to defeat their jihadis.
At the worst level, we have to worry about a large, nuclear-armed country falling to a jihadi coup.
A lesser bad thing is losing our supply line through Pakistan's tribal areas. With our troop levels going up, this becomes more worrisome.
So we've muddled along, straddling the problem hoping we can get Pakistan to do enough to help win but not so much that it provokes a backlash and cracks the fragile Pakistani society. We've had little choice. Pakistan hasn't had the will to really wage war against the jihadis. Either from inability or unwillingness.
Our recent decision to pump money into Pakistan without demanding additional efforts against the jihadis as a precondition for the aid reflects the continuing dilemma and the hope we can prop up the Pakistani government. And our Predator strikes in the frontier regions despite the anger that it can provoke amongst Pakistanis reflect that we can't count on the Pakistani military to keep the jihadis off balance.
The problem is that Pakistan may not be able to straddle this dilemma much longer:
"It's a disaster in the making on the scale of the Iranian revolution," said a U.S. intelligence official with long experience in Pakistan who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly.
Pakistan's fragmentation into warlord-run fiefdoms that host al Qaida and other terrorist groups would have grave implications for the security of its nuclear arsenal; for the U.S.-led effort to pacify Afghanistan ; and for the security of India , the nearby oil-rich Persian Gulf and Central Asia , the U.S. and its allies.
" Pakistan has 173 million people and 100 nuclear weapons, an army which is bigger than the American army, and the headquarters of al Qaida sitting in two-thirds of the country which the government does not control," said David Kilcullen , a retired Australian army officer, a former State Department adviser and a counterinsurgency consultant to the Obama administration.
" Pakistan isn't Afghanistan , a backward, isolated, landlocked place that outsiders get interested in about once a century," agreed the U.S. intelligence official. "It's a developed state . . . (with) a major Indian Ocean port and ties to the outside world, especially the (Persian) Gulf, that Afghanistan and the Taliban never had."
"The implications of this are disastrous for the U.S.," he added. "The supply lines (from Karachi to U.S. bases) in Kandahar and Kabul from the south and east will be cut, or at least they'll be less secure, and probably sooner rather than later, and that will jeopardize the mission in Afghanistan , especially now that it's getting bigger."
The article says this isn't a worst-case scenario but a likely outcome, according to US sources.
The Pakistanis think this is overblown and that they can continue to muddle along.
So what do we do if Pakistan cracks apart as the article suggests? Do we Dunkirk our forces out of Afghansitan? Or do we use our military strength next door to Pakistan while it can live off our stockpiles to try and capture or destroy the nuclear arsenal in the chaos of collapse so that the jihadis cannot gain control of it? And would the Pakistani military fight us or help us?
I hope our war effort doesn't rest upon the outcome of Pakistan realizing in time to do any good that the jihadis and not India are the main threat to them.
Yes indeed, lovely decade we're having here.
