Drone war escalates

Questions on peace arise from death of Taliban head

US President Barack Obama's weekend announcement that an authorised drone strike had killed Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansoor in Baluchistan underscored the world's worst-kept secret: Pakistani complicity in harbouring terrorists. The assassination is significant because this is the first time US drones have hit a target outside Pakistan's tribal areas and frontier region. This is, however, the second time that the US has chosen to take actions that publicly embarrass its ally - the first being the 2011 Navy SEAL operation that killed Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in a safe house close to Pakistan's capital. As with the Bin Laden raid, news of Mansoor's death has sparked speculation of how much the Pakistani government was in the loop about the operation - its low-key grumbles about a violation of sovereignty have largely been ignored - and is an indication of the impact this will have on US-Pak relations.

The question is admittedly a complicated one since the ally that single-handedly bankrolls the Pakistani state now has an equally amoral competitor in China. But the bigger issue is the US government's selective approach to the terrorist threat in Af-Pak. Its policy of pursuing terrorists it perceives as a direct threat to its interests serves no purpose - neither for the US/Nato alliance nor for the stability of the region. For instance, the assassination of Bin Laden was cathartic for the US after the September 11 attacks but it scarcely brought peace to the region. That was because the Taliban was resurgent under the patronage of the Pakistani military-intelligence complex that chose to make a bizarre distinction between "bad" and "good" terrorists. Mansoor has been at large, in Pakistan, for years; he became a target for US elimination only after he rejected peace talks and had continued to attack coalition forces in Afghanistan. His death is unlikely to deter the Taliban as the drawdown of Nato forces gathers pace. Possible successors include Sirajuddin Haqqani, the all-powerful leader of the notorious Haqqani network that flourished with US help during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Today, the Haqqani network operates its arms and drug empire openly from Pakistan's tribal areas and has been designated a "foreign terrorist organisation" by the Obama administration. Yet, despite a supposedly focused Operation called Zarb-e-Azb by the Pakistan military in collaboration with the US since 2014, Mr Haqqani remains at large. His proximity to the Pakistani military is no coincidence.

Equally, the US has not been noticeably active in pressuring Pakistan to take action against Masood Azhar, founder of the Jaish-e-Mohammad, implicated in two major attacks on India (Parliament in 2001 and Pathankot in 2016), who lives under benign house detention in Lahore. Whether terrorists are Afghanistan- or Kashmir-focused, allowing some to run free because they serve a patently untrustworthy ally's narrow cause is pointless. The linkages between jihadi terrorist outfits run deep, so unless the US takes an unequivocal stance against all terrorists, Af-Pak and, by extension, Kashmir will never see a lasting peace.