generalspeaking

Pakistan's Destabilizing Agenda

"How much worse will it get? It depends on how much regional cooperation we can secure, and how much international mediation and pressure can be exerted to create rules of the game between states."
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani

The AfPak region’s triumvirate of violent jihad — (Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour (left), Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri (right) and Sirajuddin Haqqani, the leader of the Haqqani network — is living openly in Pakistan File photos Reuters/AP

Pakistan's ferocious hatred for India has led it to focus its attention on destabilizing Afghanistan in an attempt to force the country to rely not on India for aid, but on the very country that has been staging the violence that groups like the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and latterly with the creeping presence of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, that source as well, through Pakistan's continued support of these jihadist groups. Giving them haven, supplying them with weapons and support from the Pakistan military and intelligence agency.

Direct assaults on India through Islamist fundamentalist groups in league with the Pakistan military saw Mumbai under siege by members of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan with the horrifying loss of 166 lives in 2008, and ongoing attempts to wreak havoc in disputed Kashmir, with one nuclear-armed country of Islamists provoking another nuclear-armed neighbour whose Muslim population is larger than that of Pakistan's itself, living in relative harmony with India's majority Hindus and Sikhs.

India has made attempts to intervene in Afghanistan, to offer its aid in stabilization, which has served to further infuriate Pakistan. Leading to even greater aggression targeting Afghanistan by an implacable Pakistan. In despair, Afghanistan's president expresses concern that his country, reeling from years of conflict and now with the removal of international forces, an increase in violent attacks, seeing little prospect for Afghanistan's future.

His hopes that international pressure could be manifested sufficient to alter Pakistan's path to aggression with its neighbours, are fast fading. Pakistan helped to create the Afghan Taliban, and the price it has paid itself is the emergence of a Pakistani Taliban, threatening the stability of Pakistan. But that emergence and the threat that it leads to for Pakistan's future has been incapable of providing a useful teaching experience for the country's leaders whom the military seems to lead around rather than the reverse.

The pretense by Pakistan's government that it had no idea that Osama bin Laden was living comfortably in Abbottabad a stone's throw from a military academy, and the staging of the American Navy SEALS assault that invaded the bin Laden compound, killing him and disposing of his body while retrieving an invaluable cache of intelligence was all denied by Pakistan. Which, while denying it had any idea of bin Laden's presence, arrested and jailed for what amounts to a death sentence Dr. Shakeel Afridi living next to the bin Laden compound, for treason in cooperating with the CIA.

The leader of the Haqqani network, second in command of the Taliban, lives freely in Pakistan and has been known to visit the Intelligence headquarters of the Afghan campaign in Rawalpindi, while the new Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour is openly present around the town of Quetta from where the Taliban has been enabled to launch some of its most ambitious offensives into Afghanistan. Ayman al-Zawahri, leader of Al-Qaeda, has sanctuary in Pakistan just as Osama bin Laden had. Training camps have been established in southern Afghanistan, a a result.

Which led to United States Special Operations forces on their discovery, to mount air strikes to clear the camps. But whatever is destroyed in aid of helping Afghanistan reach a stabilizing plateau where its own forces still undergoing military training of the National Police and military are hoping to be able to hold their own against the Taliban, is soon rebuilt.

Pakistan's malicious designs against both India and Afghanistan have consumed it, but at the same time as it is encouraging violent jihad against its enemies, the same violent jihad is increasingly targeting Pakistan as well. Logic and a sense of self-preservation should have it that the recognition would take place that the country is working against its best interests. But its implacable hatred against its neighbours consumes its intelligent logic capabilities and substitutes instead a blind drive toward annihilation of the governments that infuriate it in its unreasonable passion obliterating reason.

While Pakistan continues to deny it is involved in violent jihad, intelligence analysts posit that the tribal areas of Pakistan have bled foreign fighters to launch themselves against Syria's regime. That Pakistan tribesmen and members of the Taliban travelled to Quetta then on to Qatar where new passports awaited them with passage to Turkey where they conveniently crossed into Syria, boosting ISIS, and aiding in the creation of the Islamic State in 2014.

While ridding Pakistan's unruly tribal areas of Sunni jihadists, and escorting them to Syria, the spread of Islamist jihad has continued  unabated. These Isamists turn up in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir and Afghanistan, many for the purpose of training and enlisting insurgents. Some are clerics fresh out of the Haqqana madrassas in Pakistan, some returning to home villages in Afghanistan where they run mosques and organize Taliban followers.

Labels: Afghanistan, India, Jihadists, Pakistan, Taliban

posted by Pieface @ Monday, February 15, 2016