Left Flank

If deportation is a form of respect for a writer's touching a nerve, then Nicolas Schmidle must have spoken truth to power. Schmidle's feature on the messy alliance between the Taliban's godfather, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, and the Next-Gen Taliban comes with both a plea for democracy and an indictment of President Pervez Musharraf.

I asked Rehman, who used to refer to the Taliban as «our boys,» if he still considered the Taliban, even those who might be firing rockets at his house, his boys. «Definitely,» he replied. «But because of America's policies, they have gone to the extreme. I am trying to bring them back into the mainstream. We don't disagree with the mujahedeen's cause, but we differ over priorities. They prefer to fight, but I believe in politics.»

Mushahid Hussain, secretary general of the pro-Musharraf faction of the Pakistan Muslim League, told me that no one can negotiate the politics of the North-West Frontier Province better than Rehman. «We know that we need a bearded, turbaned guy out there,» Hussain told me. It is perhaps a measure of how inextricable Islamism and politics have become in Pakistan that even the United States would deal with an anti-American like Rehman. In September, he had the first meeting of his 30-year political career with an American ambassador. What did Rehman and Anne Patterson, the American envoy, discuss? «She urged me to form an electoral alliance with Benazir Bhutto and Musharraf,» he told me a few days after the meeting. «I am not against it. But politically, because of the American presence in Afghanistan and rising extremism, it is a bit hard for us to afford.» Plus, the fact that the Americans thought Bhutto could tackle the Taliban had simply baffled him. «She has no strategy in those areas, and nothing to do with those people,» he said.

When asked if Patterson's meeting signaled a change in American attitudes, an embassy spokeswoman said it «reflects our approach to democratic politics in Pakistan» and was «part of a process of talking to all those who represent political movements in Pakistan, across the spectrum.» The U.S. has given more than $5 billion to Pakistan in the past few years to fight Islamist militants, but recent reports suggest that the aid has not been effective. Late last month, Congress put restrictions on some military aid and called for the restoration of democratic rights.

Even after the Bhutto assassination, Rehman told me he would stay in the election — although, as he put it, «the reality is that this is complete anarchy, and no one can run a campaign.»

Schmidle discusses these issues and returning to the US with his wife after receiving his walking papers from a motorcycle-equipped ISI agent. Washington, is it time to turn a page?

It's amazing how both A.Q. Khan and the Taliban benefited from the same myopic geopolitical calculation that continues to plague Afghanistan.

For a second time the American government had decided that short-term strategic considerations outweighed the future danger from Pakistan's nuclear ambitions, again opening the door to Khan and his associates. Four years earlier, the CIA had decided to let the Pakistani scientist escape Dutch arrest and continue gathering the know-how and equipment for the enrichment plant, so that the Americans could keep track of what the Pakistanis were doing on the nuclear front. Now, Carter and Brzezinski were giving carte blanche to carry on its nuclear-weapons development in exchange for its help against the Soviets. The goal of stopping Pakistan's nuclear effort was sacrificed, and American moral authority to advocate for the cause of nonproliferation was severely damaged.

Anyone who doubted the lasting damage of that decision on American proliferation policy needed only to listen to Ronald Reagan, the former California governor who was seeking the Republican presidential nomination to run against Carter. Reagan was determined to go much further. During a campaign stop in Jacksonville, Florida on January 31, 1980, he was asked his concerns about Pakistan's nuclear-weapons ambitions. "I just don't think it's any of our business," he replied.

Reagan won the Republican nomination and defeated Carter...but the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan was just beginning, and the new president wasted no time embracing the new leniency on Pakistan's nuclear program. It was decided that Washington could live with Pakistan's pursuit of an atomic bomb as long as it got the help it needed against the Soviets. Reagan's first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, told Pakistani officials that their nuclear program "need not become the centerpiece of the US-Pakistan relationship." For the next eight years, the Reagan administration concentrated on keeping Pakistan on its side against the Soviets, while Pakistan concentrating on perfecting its bomb.

The nuclear-weapons policy of the Reagan administration's relationship with Pakistan's General Zia ul-Haq, communicated during his visit to the White House in December 1982, contained three "red-lines" on nuclear weapons, all of which ul-Haq eventually crossed without American reprisal: no manufacturing; no transferring of technology; and, no embarrassing the US with a public act of progress toward a weapon.

Meanwhile, the CIA was funding the ISI's open-ended support for Sunni Afghan Talibs from its compound in Islamabad...

Joshua Foust recommends two geostrategic essays on Pakistan, and I'll second that. Both are a healthy departure from William Kern's alarmism. Not that the prospect of a nuclear-armed state unravelling is not worrisome, but how often do the interests of Saudi Arabia, India, PRC, and the US line up? The second post reminds the US, as Elizabeth Bumiller reminds us "How Bhutto Won Washington", that "how little the United States fathomed the feudal politics of South Asia, and its own ability to control events in the cauldron of Pakistan."

Ironically, the Bhutto assassination might have more impact on the US primary elections (at least for Senator Joe Biden's chances for third place in Iowa) than on Pakistan.

Giving of its largesse with no apparent reward just is not American:

The Bush administration has to rethink more than just its unhealthy and destructive enabling of Musharraf. It also must take a hard look at the billions it is funneling to Pakistan's military. That money is supposed to finance the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But Washington hasn't kept a close watch, and much of it has gone to projects that interested Musharraf and the Pakistani Army more, like building weapons systems aimed at America's ally, India. Meanwhile, Al Qaeda and the Taliban continued, and continue, to make alarming gains.

The United States cannot afford to have Pakistan unravel any further. The lesson of the last six years is that authoritarian leaders - even ones backed with billions in American aid - don't make reliable allies, and they can't guarantee security.

American policy must be directed at building a strong democracy in Pakistan that has the respect and the support of its own citizens and the will and the means to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Pakistan is a nation of 165 million people. The days of Washington mortgaging its interests there to one or two individuals must finally come to an end.

After Benazir Bhutto (IHT)

But, the assassinations of affluent Muslim women have always had a substantial effect on American politicians and the public.

As three Talibs brag about how much evil South Korean ransom buys (via Lost Nomad), South Korean hostages not fortunate enough to be kidnapped in Afghanistan or to be recruited from a rich congregation in Seoul, have languished in limbo since May, 2007.

Of course unlike the 23 Christian missionaries and Kim-Sun-il for that matter, the 4 Koreans in Somalia aren?t getting that much media attention, and as a result the Korean government may have decided to ?forget? about the hostages and hope that the problem will go away.

Rather than a matter of public support for dumb evangelicals, perhaps it's cost-benefit analysis. It's a matter of how to use taxpayer won most wisely. Four sailors just can't give Seoul the sort of anti-American bang for the won - that keeps on killing - blundering into a Muslim battlefront can.