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November 07, 2007

A Choice Between Bad & Worse in Pakistan

By Jack Kelly

If you want the inside dope on the situation in Pakistan, think heroin.

Pakistan is by far the most important Muslim country. Pakistan's population of about 165 million is more than that of all the Arab countries combined. And Pakistan has nuclear weapons.

But Pakistan is a melange of ethnic groups that don't like each other much. Five major languages are spoken. The gap between rich and poor is immense, the cultural divide between the Islamist majority and the Westernized elite larger still. "Pakistan is a deeply divided entity (it is not quite reasonable to call it a nation) presided over by a state," says Stratfor, a private intelligence service.

What holds Pakistan together is its army. Last weekend the head of the army, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who is also the president, imposed martial law.

Pakistan is in many ways our most important ally. Most of the al Qaida leaders we've captured have been captured with the assistance of the Pakistani government. Without overflight and transit rights through Pakistan we'd have enormous difficulty supporting the fledgling democracy in Afghanistan.

But Pakistan is also, in many ways, al Qaida's most important ally. Al Qaida's senior leadership has taken refuge in Waziristan, in Pakistan's wild west. The Taliban is largely a creation of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

Many in the ISI are Islamists themselves, but the chief reason is heroin. Afghanistan produces about 90 percent of the world supply. Opium poppies have been cultivated in Afghanistan for centuries, but it wasn't until the 1980s that the Afghan opium trade was internationalized.

"It was the brainstorm of Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, director general of the ISI in the late 1980s, to sponsor the widespread cultivation of poppies into heroin which was to be smuggled into the Soviet-controlled areas to make Soviet troops heroin addicts," wrote Jack Wheeler, who spent much of the 1980s in Afghanistan with anticommunist resistance movements.

ISI generals were making so much money from the heroin trade they had no intention of giving it up when the Soviets left Afghanistan. They set the previously obscure Taliban up to be their partners.

There are three major smuggling routes to transport opium base to the West, all controlled chiefly by the ISI. The original one runs through Tajikistan to Russia. Another is through the port city of Karachi.

(Heroin money is as important to Karachi today as cocaine money was to Miami's prosperity in the 1980s and 1990s.) The third runs through Iran, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Turkey into the Balkans.

Pakistan has been more our ally than al Qaida's because of an ultimatum then Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage delivered to Gen. Musharraf hours after 9/11. If he would side with us, we would shower him with aid. If he didn't, we would shower him with bombs.

Pakistan has done just enough to keep the aid spigot flowing -- $10 billion so far. But valuable as the rendition of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, and others has been, Jack Wheeler notes: "Osama bin Laden and Taliban chief Mullah Omar remain safe and secure."

But the calculus has been changing, not because Gen. Musharraf has had a change of heart, but because his control over the country has been weakening. Pakistan's military has suffered a string of defeats in Waziristan. Gen. Musharraf lacks the strength, and perhaps the desire, to crack down on the terrorists and the drug trade.

The skyrocketing death toll from terrorism is the reason why he declared martial law, Gen. Musharraf said. The recent decision of Pakistan's supreme court to free 61 terror suspects forced his hand.

The real catalyst, thinks Stratfor, was that the supreme court was about to rule he must resign as chief of staff of the army, or as president.

Gen. Musharraf's wrath has fallen mostly on the democratic opposition.

The members of the supreme court have been put under house arrest. More than 1,500 lawyers have been detained. The press has been muzzled.

Meanwhile, Gen. Musharraf has negotiated a deal which in effect gives al Qaida a safe haven, Bill Roggio reported in the Long War Journal.

Gen. Musharraf is an increasingly unsavory and unreliable ally. But a sometime friend is better than a full time enemy. Often the only choices we have in foreign policy are between bad and worse. In Vietnam in 1963 and in Iran in 1978, we chose worse. Let's not do that again.

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