By IANS,
Washington : Pakistan’s Army helps the Afghan Taliban in fighting the Afghan government because it dreads a pro-India regime on its western border, according to a former analyst of Central Intelligence Agency.
“The Pakistani Army has an agenda that is at odds with ours. At bottom, we are on opposite sides of the war in
Afghanistan, and that poisons everything,” Bruce Riedel, now a foreign policy fellow at Brookings, a Washington think said in a commentary in The Daily Beast.
“This trust gap is the result of decades of mutual deceit and lying. Pakistan proclaimed it was our ally against communism or Al Qaeda or whatever when what it really just wanted was arms and help to fight India,” he wrote. This was something that India has been telling the US for decades, but the realisation has come to Washington only recently in the wake of Islamabad’s continued double-dealing on issues of strategic consequence for the US.
“Since at least 2005, Pakistan’s Army has been assisting the Afghan Taliban in fighting the Afghan government we support and the world accepts as the legitimate government of the country,” Riedel said.
“Pakistan’s Army backs a medieval monstrosity that would impose a reprise of the Taliban hell of the 1990s,” he said suggesting, “It prefers this to what it dreads: a pro-India regime on its western border.”
“It tries to hide its hand, but regularly its troops along the border shelter the Taliban and even provide artillery support,” Riedel said. “It harbours their leaders, including Mullah Mohammed Omar in Quetta. It gives training and advice to those who kill Americans.”
“This is the fundamental problem that all the diplomatic niceties can’t ignore,” Riedel said. “NATO supports the Karzai government. Pakistan’s Army (not its civilian government) backs the Afghan Taliban,” he said suggesting the Army has politically neutered the civilians elected to run Pakistan in 2008.