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Get Tough with Pakistan
by Jonathan Foreman
The New York Post, October 22, 2001

If it weren't already plain that Secretary of State Colin Powell, for all his virtues, may be the wrong man to be running U.S. foreign policy at this time, then his unfortunate visit to South Asia last week should make it abundantly clear.

By the time he had left the region, shells were falling once again in the high Himalayan passes as Pakistan and India mobilized troops on each side of the cease-fire line in Kashmir. And everyone - India, Pakistan and the Afghan Northern Alliance - was more convinced than ever that America would somehow betray or fail them while giving one of the others some special influence in postwar Afghanistan.

This is what happens when the means is mistaken for the end - when coalition-building becomes more important than the point of the coalition: winning the war against terror.

In what was presumably an attempt to bolster the Pakistani regime's inadequate support for U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, Powell said some ill-considered and possibly dangerous things to Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the leader of the military junta in Islamabad, and pushed our diplomacy in precisely the wrong direction.

* He said that America would support a new government in Afghanistan that
includes "mod- erate" elements of the Taliban - the ultra-fundamentalist ruling militia that Pakistan sponsored, armed and continues to favor - despite the fact that the Taliban voluntarily shelters and assists Osama bin Laden.

* Powell then gratuitously alienated our powerful and increasingly important Indian allies by saying that the issue of Kashmir was at the core of tensions in the region and that America was open to expanding its military ties to Pakistan.

* And this comes as we let down the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, declining to bomb Taliban forces near alliance troops - again out of deference to Pakistani sensibilities.

The message is clear: Pakistan's disastrous interference in Afghanistan is forgiven.

Yet the truth is that we really don't need to be this nice to Pakistan - and shouldn't be.

Like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan has decided to become our ally only in a nominal sense, an "ally" whose interests and actions are often hostile to our own. And its "help" in this campaign - which doesn't include the use of key bases for military operations except for search and rescue - simply isn't worth this degree of compromise.

All we really need from Pakistan is the use of its airspace - and that is not something that Pakistan is in any position to deny us.

The State Department will often argue that Pakistan must be kept sweet because it has a small number of atom bombs - ones that might even work. And an alienated Pakistan could conceivably supply nuclear devices to its Islamic terrorist friends.

This is obviously a disturbing scenario. But if we really believed that the Pakistanis were inclined to do such a thing, we would have the right and obligation to destroy those weapons immediately and by any means we felt appropriate.

Powell should have told his interlocutors in Pakistan that Washington now has every reason to become much, much friendlier with its rival, India. India, after all, is a democratic, pluralistic and secular nation with which the United States has much in common - including being a victim of terrorism, rather than, like Pakistan, a consistent sponsor.

Powell could even have hinted that if Pakistan doesn't start being a more cooperative ally very quickly - if it doesn't choose between our friendship and its ties to the Taliban, if it doesn't stop backing Islamic terror against India - then America might become so friendly that it gives India full permission to do whatever that country thinks necessary to resolve all its problems with Islamabad.

After all, while the legalities of the Kashmir issue could be debated endlessly, and while the Indian response to separatist militancy has often been brutal, Pakistan has behaved far worse. It has actively sponsored terror groups in Kashmir, including some linked to bin Laden's al Qaeda.

It wouldn't be easy for Musharraf to take a stronger stand against the Taliban and for America, of course. His country is a corrupt, impoverished, and profoundly unstable hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism and anti-Americanism.

By genuinely aligning with the United States, Musharraf would risk being overthrown in a popular revolt led by Islamist army officers or his country's powerful, sinister intelligence service, the ISI. Yet, to date, he has used this an excuse to extract concessions from America, and not as a reason to consolidate his grip on power.

So, in response, we should offer him a carrot - substantial economic (not military) assistance, to help assuage the poverty that feeds fundamentalism in his country and help build real schools to replace the madrassas - the extremist Islamic schools where fanatics are bred. But we must make it clear that we are set on ending the Taliban state no matter how much Pakistan dislikes the idea.

It's premature anyway to talk in detail about a successor state - we are far from victory in Afghanistan. And Powell should explain carefully what he means by "moderate" Taliban elements before offering them a friendly hand.

Any new Afghan government will indeed have to include representation from the Pashtun-dominated South and East. But it's not clear if any "moderate" Taliban officials even exist, or if there are "moderate" Taliban officials only in the sense that there were "moderate" Nazis in 1945.

True, the Northern Alliance's various factions have their share of bandits, fundamentalists and heroin smugglers. But the Taliban have behaved with a murderous cruelty - toward women, their political opponents and members of the Hazara ethnic minority - which shocks even their fellow Pathans, used as they are to war and blood feud. The Taliban, more than anyone else, are responsible for the current humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan.

If these crimes were not enough, their regime has sustained and is sustained by the al Qaeda Arab terror group that started a war with the United States on 9/11.

For all these reasons, the Taliban must surrender power - and Pakistan must stop trying to protect it.