It is in the wake of these turbulent developments that Pakistani writer Ahmed Rashid has emerged as unquestionably the best-informed and most courageous writer on developments in Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Central Asian Republics and in describing the factors that led to the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Well before the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and at a time when the Clinton Administration was describing the Taliban as a "factor for stability," in the hope that the Taliban would assist American oil majors like UNOCAL to exploit the gas resources of Turkmenistan for conveying to ports in Pakistan, Rashid had warned of the dangers that the Taliban and its ISI mentors would pose to regional peace and security and to the security and stability of Pakistan itself. What Rashid lucidly exposes in his latest book is that even as the United States sought to use Pakistan for its strategic interests, Pakistan's military rulers had their own ideas on how they would use American assistance to promote their own interests, by making Afghanistan a client state and using the "strategic depth" thus obtained to wage "Jihad" against India.

In military parlance this was Pakistan's strategy to secure "strategic depth in relation to India". It was the pursuit of this objective that led to Pakistani support for the emergence of the Taliban, though the dubious distinction of setting up the Taliban should go to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, her Interior (Home) Minister Major General Nasrullah Babbar and her coalition ally Maulana Fazlur Rahman, the head of the Deobandi Jamiat ulema e Pakistan.

Rashid doesn't spare the Bush Administration, asserting it had no coherent strategy to deal with the entire exercise of "Nation building" after the Taliban fled the country in the wake of attacks by the forces of the Northern Alliance," with assistance from the CIA and American air power. He aptly notes that it was the reluctance of the American commander General Tommy Franks to put his soldiers in harm's way by blocking the exit routes of the Taliban leadership and its fighters into Pakistan which allowed the Taliban leadership, led by its one-eyed Amir, Mullah Omar, to stream into Quetta, the capital of Pakistan's Baluchistan Province, while its military component led by commanders like Jalaluddin Haqqani and their Al Qaeda allies sneaked into the tribal areas of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP).

Running with the Taliban hare while hunting with the American hound has had its inevitable consequences for Pakistan. The entire Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan is today under virtual Taliban control. In his conclusion Rashid notes: "Today, seven years after 9/11 Mullah Omar and the original Afghan Shura still live in Baluchistan Province. Afghans and Pakistani Taliban leaders live further north in FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas), as do the militias of Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hikmetyar. Al Qaeda has safe havens in FATA, and along with them reside a plethora of Asian and Arab terrorist groups".

The recent attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul has to be seen in the context of Pakistan's continuing support for the Taliban and radical Islamic groups in its neighbourhood — a policy which its military establishment continues to follow despite the huge domestic costs and foreign policy damage this policy has caused. One hopes that all this causes policymakers in New Delhi to get realistic and stop deluding themselves and the country at large by making out that Pakistan's hard-boiled military establishment will end terrorism merely by resorting to ill-advised steps like setting up a so-called "Joint Terror Mechanism".

The author was India's High Commissioner to Pakistan

DESCENT INTO CHAOS
HOW THE WAR AGAINST ISLAMIC TERRORISM IS BEING LOST IN PAKISTAN, AFGHANISTAN AND CENTRAL ASIA

Ahmed Rashid (author);
Allen Lane;
484 pages; Rs 495