[Mb-civic] Message to Musharraf - Jim Hoagland - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Message to Musharraf

By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, January 22, 2006; B07

Death to America. Oh, wait. Thank you, America. Love you, big guy. No, 
hold on. Where's that "Death to America" banner? What have they done for 
us lately?

Pakistani mobs are back in the streets denouncing American military 
strikes aimed at terrorists sheltering in Pakistan. The carefully staged 
fury of those mobs eclipses the public opinion polls of a few weeks ago 
reporting significant gratitude from Pakistanis for U.S. military help 
after a catastrophic earthquake.

Easy come, easy go? Not exactly. The suffering villagers expressing 
gratitude have not suddenly morphed into the well-fed, bearded zealots 
marching in Peshawar. But in Pakistan, public opinion and the 
government's reactions to U.S. help -- and U.S. hurt -- are highly 
volatile and zoom to extremes. That volatility in turn underlines the 
unsteady course of the Bush administration's effort to eliminate al 
Qaeda and its Taliban allies.

In its tangled relations with Pakistan, Washington rides something far 
more dangerous than an opinion roller coaster. President Pervez 
Musharraf's military regime is the most difficult government in the 
world to fit into Washington's struggle against Islamic extremist groups.

Pakistan is essential and helpful in fighting the al Qaeda network -- 
except when it is not. Without Musharraf's help, the United States and 
its NATO allies cannot put down the rebellion in Afghanistan being waged 
by Osama bin Laden's fanatics and the Taliban. Without Musharraf's 
complicity, that rebellion could not continue at its increasingly 
murderous intensity. We've got Musharraf right where he wants us.

Washington and Islamabad are condemned to such strategic ambivalence. 
Each is unable to do without the other, while wishing it could. That is 
the political context for the continuing fallout from the unacknowledged 
U.S. missile strike aimed at al Qaeda bigwigs in the Pakistani village 
of Damadola on Jan. 13 -- an incident that looms large in Prime Minister 
Shaukat Aziz's visit to Washington this week.

The Hellfire missiles aimed from a Predator drone at the bin Laden 
operatives gathering in Damadola also carried a badly needed message for 
Musharraf and his intelligence chiefs, who helped create both al Qaeda 
and Afghanistan's Taliban: The sanctuary those groups have been granted 
in Pakistan's remote tribal lands on the Afghan frontier now exceeds the 
limits of strategic ambiguity.

Suicide bombings and attacks with roadside explosive devices directed at 
U.S. and NATO troops as well as Afghan authorities have spiked upward in 
recent months. U.S. intelligence reports to the Pakistanis on terrorist 
locations and movements along the frontier have received no effective 
response from Pakistani authorities during this damaging terrorist upsurge.

"You can draw the Afghan-Pakistan border on a map by looking at the 
pattern of signal intercepts," says one U.S. official. "The bad guys 
chatter away in Pakistan, feeling they are safe. That area lights up 
like a Christmas tree. Then they go silent when they cross into 
Afghanistan, where they fear getting hit."

The aerial strike on Damadola, which is four miles inside Pakistan, 
killed as many as four al Qaeda chiefs, Pakistani officials concede. 
Villagers have reported 18 deaths, including some women and children. 
Musharraf is happy to have Washington bear the entire blame in Pakistani 
opinion for the reports of collateral damage.

But the story, and the moral burden it involves, seems to be more 
complicated. The Damadola raid followed by a week a little-noticed 
assault on the Pakistani village of Saidgi in North Waziristan, where 
residents described helicopter-borne foreign troops grabbing suspects 
and flying them back to Afghanistan.

Two limited, carefully planned border attacks in rapid succession would 
appear to be something more than accidents of opportunity. The 
escalation by terrorists in Afghanistan has been met with an escalation, 
still at a low level, in U.S. attacks on Pakistani soil. Musharraf's 
failure to curb the terrorist forays into Afghanistan after the 
incursion at Saidgi conceivably led to the attack on Damadola and the 
death of innocents there.

The Bush administration is still improvising in its attempts to "enable 
and encourage" other countries to join its global strategy of 
counterterrorism. It needs to draw its European and Asian allies that 
are helping fight the terrorist networks in Afghanistan into a 
coordinated approach of pressures and incentives for the hugely 
important, and hugely dangerous, country of Pakistan.

And Washington needs to hold Musharraf's feet to the fire on al Qaeda 
and the Taliban, even as it tries to bolster him at home. Whatever else 
it did or did not accomplish, the Damadola raid surely demonstrated to 
the Pakistani president that he, too, has much to lose if the terror 
festival in Afghanistan continues to be run unhindered from Pakistani soil.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/20/AR2006012001656.html
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