Collaboration With The Enemy

Pakistan is true to form, reverting to what and how it has always valued and practised. Its relationship with NATO and the United States is one that is highly dependent on extracting as much funding as it possibly can, under the guise of collegiality. That it is equally concerned with combating terrorism as its purported allies is a useful fiction. The United States is dependent on Pakistan for assisting it in identifying and isolating and, finally, destroying the Taliban and by extension, al-Qaeda.

Neither of which have been accomplished, mostly because of the reluctance of Pakistan to forego its sovereignty, to allow an actual U.S. presence on its soil. This would not be popular with the population. And the country's sense of pride would be afflicted by any semblance of close co-operation. Pakistan appears to be fairly complacent over the fact that in its border mountainous regions next to Afghanistan, the Afghan Taliban find refuge.

It is not quite so complacent about its own home-bred Taliban. Not since the mountain tribes and their warlords have aligned themselves with al-Qaeda, and challenge the nuclear-armed Pakistani government for control and for the eventuality of fanatical Sharia to be enacted country-wide. Islamism is on the march everywhere, and it is largely thanks to Pakistan and its madrasses funded by Saudi Arabia that jihadi training camps have thrived.

Now Pakistan has dug in its heels, refusing to permit NATO vehicles access to one of its highway passes,disrupting supply routes and in the process assisting the Pakistani Taliban to torch dozens of oil tankers, and in the further process murder at least five truckers, who have no protection from these deadly raids, as they patiently await the re-opening of the northwest Pakistan route.

This is the government of Pakistan, allying itself with the Pakistan Taliban, a resurgent enemy of the administration whose armed forces clashed with the Taliban in an effort to protect areas perilously close to their nuclear installations. Angered over the U.S. incursion of several hundred yards across the border into Pakistan, where several of their soldiers opened fire on the Americans and the Americans returned fire.

And there is the government of Afghanistan, with its President, Hamid Karzai, suddenly deciding not only to attempt to entice the Afghan Taliban foot soldiers to abscond from their commitment to the Taliban for cash and integration, but conferring as well with the Afghan Taliban leaders with whom Karzai once stated he would never bargain. The women of Afghanistan may be aghast at this turn of events, but this is the manner in which events have turned.

The Americans and the British and NATO in general are putting a brave face on things. After all, they have been engaged for ten years in a battle against the Afghan Taliban whom they succeeded in routing from governance when the Taliban refused to surrender al-Qaeda. And in the last several years the resurgent Taliban have succeeded in gaining a larger territory in the country than they have ever previously controlled.

Mullah Mohammed Omar, in his brutal totalitarian administration of the country enacted Sharia laws that stoned women to death who were accused of adultery, crushed homosexuals under brick walls, amputated the hands of thieves, publicly executed by victims' families murderers, denied women from leaving their homes, refused schooling and jobs for girls and women, imposed full body coverings, and sentenced to death any who sought to religiously convert.

And this is the executive controller of the Afghan Taliban, the protector of al-Qaeda, with whom Hamid Karzai's administration is talking a cessation of 'hostilities', with an invitation to join his government, and in senior posts, at that. This is labelled the "reconciliation and reintegration" process. Which can only make an onlooker wonder why NATO troops have been troubling themselves to contain the Taliban for ten years.

And why NATO and UN-sponsored countries - that have signed on to the humanitarian task of helping to build a civil society, fund and erect civic infrastructure, train civil servants, and deploy members of their armed forces, facing the ongoing carnage of IED-caused deaths - committed themselves to the situation to begin with.