Zakaria at his best on Pakistan
Wednesday, May 19, 2010 at 12:09AM 
Trust an Indian to deliver the goods on Pakistan.
The British government has estimated that 70 percent of the terror plots it has uncovered in the past decade can be traced back to Pakistan. Pakistan remains a terrorist hothouse even as jihadism is losing favor elsewhere in the Muslim world. From Egypt to Jordan to Malaysia to Indonesia, radical Islamic groups have been weakened militarily and have lost much of the support they had politically. Why not in Pakistan? The answer is simple: from its founding, the Pakistani government has supported and encouraged jihadi groups, creating an atmosphere that has allowed them to flourish. It appears to have partially reversed course in recent years, but the rot is deep.
For a wannabe terrorist shopping for help, Pakistan is a supermarket. There are dozens of jihadi organizations: Jaish-e-Muhammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Al Qaeda, Jalaluddin and Siraj Haqqani's network, Tehrik-e-Taliban, and the list goes on. Some of the major ones, like the Kashmiri separatist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, operate openly via front groups throughout the country. But none seem to have any difficulty getting money and weapons.
The key problem: Pakistan allows terror groups that target outsiders--especially India, and really only go after ones that attack the people of Pakistan.
Zakaria cites Ahmed Rashid in noting that Pakistan is leveraging the Afghan Taliban for their own purposes and not to foster any peace with Kabul. The military still runs Pakistan, and its "strategic depth" mania holds sway.
Fareed ends the piece by noting that virtually all of the big transnational terror of the past years have stemmed from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Abdullah is working the change in the latter country, but Pakistan's military is stockpiling nukes and fighter jets with the money we send them.
We are backing the wrong horse here.
Reader Comments (2)
Like the old jibe about Prussia, "It's not a country with an army, it's an army with a country." But at least Prussia cared about education.
One reason why Iran is so upset with our opposition to its nuclear program, an officially civilian nuclear program, is our support of Pakistan. Pakistan already has the bomb. It has numerous out of control jihadi groups that support out of country terrorism. It has an intelligence service which uses at least some of these organizations for its own purposes. Yet the hypothetical threat of an Iranian bomb that does not and may never exist is considered a real threat that must be stopped at any cost. And the real Pakistani bomb and the real terrorist organizations that might get their hands on it are not seen as a threat at all.