Pakistan has fought three wars with its neighbor since the bloody partition of the subcontinent that led to the creation of the country in 1947, and mutual suspicion still hobbles relations between the two nuclear-armed powers today.
"They still think India is their primary policy," said Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani general and prominent political analyst. "India is always in the back of their minds."
In an interview with Reuters on Tuesday, Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani - unprompted - complained that Washington's failure to deal even-handedly with New Delhi and Islamabad was a source of regional instability.
Aqil Shah, a South Asia security expert at the Harvard Society of Fellows, said Islamabad's worst-case scenario would be an Afghanistan controlled or dominated by groups with ties to India, such as the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance, which it fears would pursue activities hostile to Pakistan.
That's a lot of stupid.
One, for decades when India was a close friend of the Soviet Union, we were quite unbalanced in our relations, favoring and arming Pakistan. Favoring and arming jihadis is how they repay us, along with exploiting and fanning anti-Americanism in their population.
Second, just what do the Pakistanis think that India would do if they got a pro-India Afghanistan? Turn Pakistan into a Third World, paranoid, over-populated economic basket case with a corrupt and divided society under threat by Islamo-fascists who run their own little Medieval fiefdoms on their border areas with Afghanistan? Would India conspire to build a parasitical Pakistani military-industrial-intelligence complex that is a power on its own sucking resources from an impoverished Pakistani state, is incapable of defeating the state they claim is their prime reason for existing, and undermines civilian, democratic rule? Is that what India might do to Pakistan?
Yeah, anyone who would do that to Pakistan would be pretty bad. Someone should catch those foul miscreants and hang them.
UPDATE: Wow, the stupid is getting thick:
U.S. accusations that Pakistan is supporting Afghan insurgents have triggered a nationalist backlash and whipped up media fears of an American invasion, drowning out any discussion over the army's long use of jihadi groups as deadly proxies in the region.
We wouldn't even need to invade Pakistan to beat them. Blockade them and hit their airfields while deploying our ground forces in Afghanistan to beat off any potential Pakistani ground invasion (which couldn't be much since the Pakistanis wouldn't dare strip their frontier with India of many troops), and it would just be a matter of time before Pakistan had to capitulate or use nukes.
I'd rather have Pakistan as an imperfect ally than as an enemy. But it is even more important for Pakistan to come to the same conclusion. And the situation on the ground in Afghanistan means that we can afford to push Pakistan to be less imperfect more than Pakistan can afford to push us to tolerate that imperfection.
