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Pakistan: Asia's Islamism Engine

[The Australian] Greg Sheridan - U.S. president-elect Barack Obama has suggested appointing a special presidential negotiator on Kashmir. This is a very dangerous move indeed. In light of the Mumbai attacks it would be a pure political reward for terror outrages. The message such a move would send would be: You murder enough civilians and we'll start making concessions. As the epicenter of global terrorism shifts from the Middle East to South Asia, you can see the effort to transform the Kashmir dispute into the equivalent of the Palestinian dispute; that is, the fountainhead, all-purpose grievance that can be used to explain, if not justify, every act of Islamist butchery and murder in the region. The Pakistan government denies all involvement in the Mumbai attacks and most senior Indians I speak to do not think the ineffectual Pakistani civilian government was directly involved. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to believe that an operation of such scale and sophistication, mounted by Pakistanis from within Pakistan, had no involvement from the Pakistani military or some element of its Inter Services Intelligence agency. The ISI founded Lashkar-e-Taiba to prosecute its low-level war against India in Kashmir, just as the ISI founded the Taliban to ensure a government in Afghanistan sympathetic to Pakistani interests. The parallel with the behavior of Pakistan in the A.Q. Khan scandal is instructive. The Pakistanis expect us to believe they are a responsible nuclear power, yet have no responsibility or even knowledge when their chief nuclear scientist sells nuclear weapons technology to rogue regimes across the world, often using Pakistani military transports in the process. There is no obvious path forward with Pakistan, which occupies that diabolical category of divided state, where part of the state fights terrorism and part of it enables and helps terrorism.
2008-12-05 08:00:00
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