In the eight years since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, political pundits have used, and largely overused, all the available historical references. We have had the comparisons to the British 19th century failures there, to the Great Game, and to the Soviet Union's disastrous experience in the 1980s. More recently, it has been labelled "Obama's Vietnam".

The latest leitmotif is the domino theory - the view that Vietnam had to be saved from communism or other Asian countries would go the same way.  In the case of Afghanistan, the argument is that if it falls to the Taliban, then Pakistan too might become vulnerable - an infinitely more dangerous proposition given that it is a country of some 170 million people with nuclear bombs.

Britain's Paddy Ashdown alluded to this idea in an op-ed in the Independent titled "What we must do to win this war in Afghanistan". "I start from the proposition that the war in Afghanistan is one we have to fight and must win. The cost of failure there is just too great. It includes the certain fall of Pakistan and the possible emergence of the world's first jihadist government with a nuclear weapon ..." he writes.

In an article in the American Interest, analyst Stephen Biddle spells this out further by arguing that the main reason for the United States to fight in Afghanistan is to prevent it from destabilising Pakistan.

"With a population of 173 million (five times Afghanistan’s), a GDP of more than $160 billion (more than 10 times Afghanistan’s) and a functional nuclear arsenal of perhaps 20 to 50 warheads, Pakistan is a much more dangerous prospective state sanctuary for al Qaeda. Furthermore, the likelihood of government collapse in Pakistan, which would enable the establishment of such a sanctuary, may be in the same ballpark as Afghanistan, at least in the medium to long term," he writes.

"Pakistani state collapse, moreover, is a danger over which the United States has only limited influence. We have uneven and historically fraught relations with the Pakistani military and intelligence services, and our ties with the civilian government of the moment can be no more efficacious than that government’s own sway over the country. The United States is too unpopular with the Pakistani public to have any meaningful prospect of deploying major ground forces there to assist the government in counterinsurgency."

Robert Haddick, the managing editor of Small Wars Journal, takes aim at this line of thinking in an article in Foreign Policy.

"Contrary to Biddle's assertion, it seems equally reasonable to argue that Taliban-controlled Afghanistan provided a relief valve of sorts for Islamist pressure that might have otherwise formed inside Pakistan during the 1990s. And although the Afghan Taliban and Pakistani Taliban are two distinct movements, the U.S.-led operation in Afghanistan may be inciting and pressurizing Taliban activity inside Pakistan. Contrary to what Biddle argues, the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan may be increasing rather than decreasing the risk to Pakistan," he says.

"As Biddle points out, the Barack Obama's administration will have a hard enough time maintaining public support for the Afghan campaign. Best to leave the domino theory out of it."

He is perhaps right to say that the domino theory is not a useful comparison, having been so widely discredited in Vietnam. Yet arguably the domino theory went wrong not as a concept but on specifics. The United States failed to notice that the Vietminh/Vietcong were nationalists more than communists while it also misread the intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union and China when it allowed itself to be dragged into military defeat.

But if the real reason for fighting in Afghanistan is to prevent the destabilisation of Pakistan, should this not be discussed openly?

The questions, as in Vietnam, come down to specifics. Are the Taliban primarily Pashtun nationalists who, if brought into the political power structure in Afghanistan, would cease to be a threat? Or are they primarily a religious force intent on spreading global jihad in which Pakistan would be the next domino? (Most people you ask say both, with the argument being over which characteristic predominates.) And what are the intentions of Afghanistan's neighbours, and of the United States and its allies? Would success or failure in Afghanistan lead to more problems in the neighbourhood - as was widely assumed in Vietnam - or not?

In one of the more dispassionate articles I have read on this in recent weeks, Dawn columnist Irfan Husain writes that the war in Afghanistan can be neither won nor lost.

But the price of failure, and a Western troop withdrawal would be this: "... we would be back to the pre-9/11 situation. The only difference would be that the Taliban would be viewed as the force that had defeated the mighty Americans. This would give them an aura of legitimacy and invincibility that would win them many recruits and financial backers."

"... the victorious Taliban would have their own agenda, and would not be the puppets the ISI think they would be able to manipulate. An earlier generation of jihadis drove out the Red Army, and after defeating the U.S.-led coalition, it is unlikely that Mullah Omar would accept dictation from our generals in Islamabad. Chances are that he and his Pakistani allies would seek to extend their writ across large swathes of Pakistan.

"Encouraged by the success of the holy warriors in Afghanistan, groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba would step up their jihad against India in Kashmir. A re-Talibanised Afghanistan would once again become a magnet for young jihadis from across the world. Al Qaeda would emerge from hiding and renew its war against the West and modernity. Rapidly, Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan would become the epicentre of the global jihad to an even greater extent than the region is now.

"Already, there is said to be a strong nexus between the Taliban and the Muslim Uighur separatist movement ... The Taliban, ignorant as they are of how the world works, would provoke Russia by openly supporting the Chechen rebels. In short, they would quickly antagonise India, Iran, the West, Russia and China. And as Pakistan would once again be sucked into supporting Kabul, we would be tarred with the same brush as the Taliban. This is the scenario that we and the West need to keep in mind as the war against the Taliban drags on.

"This is a war that cannot be won. But equally, it is a war that cannot be lost."

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised the possibility in April of Islamist militants taking over Pakistan and its nuclear weapons, her words were dismissed as alarmist - and perhaps deliberately so as a way of putting pressure on Islamabad to act.

The problem with Pakistan is that it is almost impossible to come up with a view that is not either alarmist or complacent. It is such a complex country that nobody can agree a frame of reference for assessing the risk. It is the base for a bewildering array of militants including Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, al Qaeda and anti-India groups, yet also has a powerful and professional army which would be expected to defend to the last its Punjab heartland and nuclear weapons against a jihadi takeover.  Its potent mix of poverty and Islamist sympathies among a significant section of the population make it ripe for revolution, yet it also has a strong and secular-minded civil society which was willing to go out into the streets earlier this year to demand an independent judiciary.

You can assess the risk in Pakistan by looking at the rate of decline in stability there, and that was faster than anyone expected over the past year or so until a military offensive against the Taliban in Swat  which began in April halted the slide.

Or you can look at the worst case scenario, of Islamist militants taking over a nuclear-armed Pakistan, and decide that even if that outcome is unlikely, the potential dangers arising from it are so great as to put Pakistani stability at the top of global risks.

In an essay in the National Interest, Bruce Riedel, the former CIA officer who led a review of strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan for President Barack Obama, lays out the implications of that worst case scenario.

"A jihadist Pakistan would be the most serious threat to the United States since the end of the Cold War.  Aligned with al-Qaeda and armed with nuclear weapons, the Islamic Emirate of Pakistan would be a nightmare. U.S. options for dealing with it would all be bad," he writes.

And if the United States were to try to invade "the Pakistanis would, of course, use their nuclear weapons to defend themselves. While they do not have delivery systems capable of reaching America, they could certainly destroy cities and bases in Afghanistan, India, the Gulf states and, if smuggled out ahead of time by terrorists, perhaps the United States. A victory in such a conflict would be Pyrrhic indeed.

"Of course, the hardest problem would be the day after. What would we do with a country twice the size of California with enormous poverty, almost 50 percent illiteracy and intense popular hatred for all that we stand for after we have fought a nuclear war to occupy it?"

Riedel's essay, titled "Armageddon in Islamabad" goes some way to answering the oft-asked question of why western troops are fighting in Afghanistan when al Qaeda and its allies are believed to be based in Pakistan. It also helps explain why the United States is so keen to see a peace deal with India that might help stabilise the country.

"A jihadist, nuclear-armed Pakistan is a scenario we need to avoid at all costs," he says. That means working with the Pakistan we have today to try to improve its spotty record on terrorism and proliferation. There is good reason for pessimism. Working with the existing order in Pakistan may not succeed. But there is every reason to try, given the horrors of the alternative."

Do read it in conjunction with this article in the CTC Sentinel (pdf), in which Shaun Gregory, a professor at Britain's Bradford University, assesses the risk of Pakistan's nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Islamist militants. The nuclear weapons, he argues, are well guarded by the Pakistan Army against the internal threat of a seizure by Islamist militants. But this also means that they could not be spirited out of the country by a third party, or destroyed, in the event of a state collapse.

A spate of bombs targeting churches in Baghdad this week has Iraq's minority Christian community trembling at the prospect of being the next victim of militants trying to reignite war.

Iraqi Christians, one of the country's weakest ethnic or  religious groups, have usually tried to steer clear of its many-sided conflict. For the most part, they manage.

While Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims killed each other by the dozen at the height of Iraq's sectarian conflict in 2006 and 2007, Christians were rarely targeted, although sometimes they were.

(Photo: A policeman at the site of a car bomb attack on a Baghdad church, 13 July 2009/Saad Shalash)

On Sunday, in apparently coordinated attacks, five bombs went off outside churches in Baghdad, killing four people and wounding 21, including a number of Christians.

Iraqi Christians or "Messihi", as they are called by an Arabic word related to the Hebrew term "Messiah,"  number around 750,000. That makes them a tiny minority in a Muslim nation of 28 million. They are mostly concentrated around Baghdad and the violent northern city of Mosul, which is still struggling to shake off al Qaeda and other Sunni Arab insurgent groups.

Historically, though, they have got on well with their Muslim compatriots. Under Ottoman rule, non-Islamic faiths were generally respected. More recently, Saddam Hussein used to draw attention to his Chaldean Christian Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz, currently doing time for assisting Saddam's mass murders of Iraqi merchants, as an example of the Baath party's religious tolerance.

But partly because they are small, Christians are an easy target. About 2,000 families, an estimated 12,000 people, fled Mosul after a campaign of threats and attacks on Christians there in October last year, but many have since returned.

(Photo: A man cleans up after a bomb attack on a Baghdad church, 13 July 2009/Thaier al-Sudani)

"Attacking Christians can have a big impact on public opinion, because they are a minority and the international media will take this news seriously. That's what the extremists want," William Warida, a Christian and chairman of a Baghdad human rights organisation told me. "And some extremists just don't want the existence of Christians in this country at all."

The country's Christians fall into roughly two denominations, the majority Chaldeans under the authority of the Vatican and the minority Assyrians. "We are like one family, with two brothers: one is Chaldean, one is Assyrian. I have four grandsons: two are Assyrian and two Chladean," says Assyrian Christian parliamentarian Yunadim Kanna. According to the Rome-based news agency Asianews.it, both Chaldean and Assyrian churches were attacked.

Many Iraqi Christians from both branches speak Syriac-Aramic, a semitic tongue related to old Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.

Today, many of them live in exile in Jordan or Syria, scared off by the chaos unleashed by the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

(Photo: Mourners grieve at funeral of bombing victim, 14 July 2009/Mohammed Ameen)

"After Sunday, the Christians that were thinking of coming back from outside, now maybe they will change their minds," said Warida. "This was a message to them not to come back."

The Vatican's procurator for Chaldean Catholics, Chorbishop Philip Najeem, gave the same analysis in an interview with Vatican Radio.

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The Pakistan Army is engaged in what appears to be a very nasty little war in the Swat valley against heavily armed Taliban militants.  With journalists having left Swat, there have been no independent reports of what is going on there, though the scale of the operation can be partly measured by the huge numbers of refugees - nearly 1.7 million - who fled to escape the military offensive.

Dawn newspaper carried an interview with a wounded soldier saying the Taliban had buried mines and planted IEDs every 50 metres.  ‘They positioned snipers in holes made out of the walls of houses. They used civilians as human shields. They used to attack from houses and roofs," it quoted him as saying. ‘They are well equipped, they have mortars. They have rockets, sniper rifles and every type of sophisticated weapons."

Al Jazeera's correspondent said that the battle was about to get worse as the army prepared to enter Mingora, the main town in the Swat valley. The BBC's Urdu service managed to talk to a couple of people trapped inside Mingora, one of whom mentioned coming across an Arab among a group of militants.

President Asif Ali Zardari has talked of extending the battle into Waziristan, believed to be the hideout of al Qaeda, and now Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said a U.S. military offensive in southern Afghanistan could push Taliban fighters from there into Pakistan's Baluchistan province. (To get a sense of the geographical scale of this, scroll down to the map at the bottom of this page to see how far Quetta, the main city in Baluchistan, is from the Swat valley.) Mullen said both U.S. and Pakistani forces were aware of the risk of a spillover from Afghanistan into Pakistan, and were planning measures to prevent it.

He did not say how they would do this, although the Wall Street Journal said earlier this week that the United States was sending 25 to 50 Special Forces personnel into Baluchistan to train Pakistanis, bringing U.S. troops deeper into Pakistan. The Special Forces would focus on training Pakistan's Frontier Corps, but were not meant to fight alongside them, it said. But it added, "A senior American military officer said he hoped Islamabad would gradually allow the U.S. to expand its training footprint inside Pakistan's borders. A former U.S. official familiar with the plans said the deployments would 'get more American eyes and ears' into the strategically important region."

U.S. officials say Quetta is the base for the Afghan Taliban and its leader Mullah Omar, who are able to hide in the Afghan refugee camps that sprang up after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. (Mukhtar Khan at CTC Sentinel has a detailed report on the Afghan Taliban in Quetta which you can find by scrolling down on this pdf document.)

But taking on the Afghan Taliban in Baluchistan, while also chasing the Pakistan Taliban out of Swat, and pursuing al Qaeda in Waziristan would be a massive operation. It's not clear whether there is some kind of masterplan and timeline for all this that we have yet to be told about, or if as Cyril Almeida worries in a column in Dawn, the Pakistan government is simply "steering blindfolded" with "a mix of lucky breaks and nonsense planning."

Nor is it clear how all this fits into the plans set out by the U.S. administration of President Barack Obama for Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are looking more and more in need of revision every day.

(Photos taken at Baine Baba Ziarat mountain in Swat during trip organised by Pakistan Army/Mian Kursheed)

By William Maclean

The flow of foreign militants to Pakistan worries Western governments, which fear the south Asian country has replaced Iraq as the place to go for aspiring Islamists planning attacks on the West.

The camps will probably be smaller and the skills on offer less photogenic to al Qaeda’s online video audience, but that is no deterrent to Arabs, Central Asians and Europeans making their way to the turbulent northwestern tribal areas.

Those arrivals are in addition to a steady flow of Britons of Pakistani descent who have visited the area for many years, security sources say. The assumption among many Western officials is that U.S. success in Iraq since 2006 has diverted some recruits for the anti-Western cause to the Pakistan-Afghan theatre.

While Iraq rarely provided the range of commando-style training available in the 1990s at sprawling al Qaeda camps on the border with Afghanistan, Iraq’s draw as a battlefield in 2003-2006 diverted potential jihadi trainees away from Pakistan.

The goal today for these young men is to fight U.S. forces in neighbouring Afghanistan or to gain the skills to carry out attacks back home in the Middle East, Africa or the West.

Now, porous borders, corrupt officials and inventive smugglers mean a determined foreigner has little problem simply entering Pakistan, experts say, although reaching a camp in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas can be harder due to U.S. drone attacks and tougher security checks by militant groups.

Counter-terrorism experts also say that Somalia and Yemen are also emerging as destinations for aspiring al Qaeda fighters.

The following are a selection of quotes on this topic from security officials and analysts.

Rob Wainwright, Director of the European Union police agency Europol

“We see a pattern which shows Afghanistan and Pakistan seem to have replaced Iraq as preferred destinations for volunteers wishing to engage in armed conflict … We still see that recruits travel to training camps as part of their radicalisation process.

“Those who get training on the Pakistani-Afghan border are from various backgrounds — for example European converts and persons with Arab, North African and Turkish backgrounds.”

“Some of these persons who have been trained in Pakistan were arrested in Europe in connection with cases of attempt of terrorist attacks.”

Brynjar Lia, research professor, Norwegian Defence Research Establishment.

“There is an increased emphasis on Afghanistan and Pakistan as a jihadi arena in al Qaeda’s online propaganda … The appearance of European jihadis in al Qaeda propaganda material, for example martyrdom videos, suggests the numbers are increasing.”

But Pakistan’s “distance from the heart of the Arab world in general, and from Palestine in particular, is a big minus compared to the Iraqi battlefield, according to al Qaeda ideologues.”

Richard Barrett, coordinator of the U.N.’s al Qaeda-Taliban monitoring team.

“Training over the last couple of years has typically taken place in small compounds which you find throughout the area of northwest Pakistan, rather than in large purpose-built camps. I have also heard of it taking place in apartments or houses in places like Karachi. It is hard to spot and quantify.”

Senior Belgian police officer Alain Grignard, quoted by U.S.-based counter-terrorism publication CTC Sentinel.

“Not since before 9/11 have we seen as many people travel towards the Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict region.”

Brian Glyn Williams, Associate Professor of Islamic History at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.

“I’ve seen epitaphs of Kazakhs, Turks, Azerbaijanis, and Uzbekistanis on recent jihadi websites (related to the Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict zone).

British counter-terrorism source

“People are still continuing to go (from Britain). Numbers are hard to judge but it remains a matter of concern.

Drone attacks have had a suppressant effect, making training and communication harder for al Qaeda and linked groups.”

Raphael Perl, Head of the Action Against Terrorism Unit at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

“There’s no question that people are still going and the campaign to recruit people has intensified greatly.

“A small percentage go into active operations immediately. Some are just used for cannon fodder, in that part of Asia. And some of the very capable ones are sent back and told blend into society.”

Jean-Pierre Filiu, associate professor at the Paris Institute of Political Studies.

“The Iraq war bred a new generation of (French-based) jihadis who weren’t involved in violent extremism before … There was the fear of a backlash from people coming back from Iraq, battle-hardened and with new techniques. So the backlash was handled, those people were monitored closely, several networks were dismantled.
“French militants don’t go to Pakistan or Yemen.”

Noman Benotman, Libyan former anti-Soviet fighter in Afghanistan.

“I think the message many Arabs receive from al Qaeda leaders nowadays is - don’t come here (to Pakistan). We don’t need you here: Go to Yemen’.”

“And we have seen a move to Yemen, mainly by Saudis, to strengthen the al Qaeda base there. It represents a big danger.”

Anne Stenersen, the Terrorism Research Group of the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment.

“My general impression is the flow of fighters is definitely not as big as it was in the 1980s, since the situation today is completely different — in the 1980s the jihad against the USSR was more widely accepted, travel was less restricted, etc…

“Today’s fighters who wish to go … would face a number of additional challenges — security services are more alert, drone attacks in the tribal areas, etc.. Also, the groups operating in this region are not a united front, but divided on vital issues such as who to fight — the ‘occupation’ of Afghanistan, or the Pakistani government. (There is) anecdotal evidence of foreign fighters who get caught up in tribal conflicts or end up fighting the Pakistani security forces for self-defence, rather than entering into Afghanistan.”

Mustafa Alani, Gulf Research Centre

(Whether in Pakistan or Yemen), the major al Qaeda investment is in recruitment, not training. Most action now involves suicide bombers or exploding a car by remote control. This mainly requires influencing the mind of the subject, while most of the physical training can be done in a room. The old-style camps we saw on the publicity videos, where fighters climb over obstacles or go across fires, are mostly in the past. The groups have passed this stage. Now it is about how to evade things like monitoring in an airport. And that is a response to the new technology of counter-terrorism.”  

Saman Zarifi, Amnesty International Asia-Pacific Director
“The madrassas are training people, taking over abandoned buildings and schools. Everyone has anecdotal evidence of Arabs and Central Asians. But it’s not the same volume as the past, as the Pakistani state is no longer in that business.”

Pakistani High Commissioner to Britain Wajid Shamsul Hasan

“The foreign militants are there … and with due assistance from our friends in the West, hopefully we can overcome them.”

For some weeks now there have been persistent reports about Taliban leader Mullah Omar, asking fighters in the Pakistani Taliban to stop carrying out attacks there and instead focus on Afghanistan where Western forces are being bolstered.

The reclusive one-eyed leader had in December sent emissaries to ask leaders of the Pakistani Taliban to settle their differences, scale down activities in Pakistan and help mount a spring offensive against the build-up of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, a report in the New York Times said as recently as last week.

But the attacks haven't stopped. If anything they have become even more brazen, with the Sri Lankan cricket team attacked in Lahore earlier this month and then Monday's rampage through a police academy, again in Lahore. Between these two major attacks,  there has a been suicide bombing in a mosque in the northwest near the Afghan border, a car bombing outside Peshawar and a blast in Rawalpindi, turning March into one of the bloodiest months in recent times.

And on Tuesday, Pakistani Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, in a rather rare move, claimed responsibiity for the storming of the police training centre in Lahore, destroying whatever was left of Mullah Omar's reported calls for cooling off in Pakistan.

Is Mehsud going off-message ? Or is he setting another course?

Mehsud told a Reuters reporter that the attack on the police academy was to avenge U.S. missile strikes by unmanned aircraft. These Predator drone raids have been focused on the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) including South Waziristan, his base.  According to U.S. army officials these attacks have taken a toll, accounting for a significant  number of senior al Qaeda figures.

Mehsud has threatened more attacks, including in Washington which last week announced a $5 million reward for information leading to his location or arrest. So what really is behind the stepped up attacks inside Pakistan? Are the Pakistani Taliban, an off-spring of the Afghan Taliban, falling instead into an ever deeper thrall of al Qaeda? 

By most assessments, Al Qaeda is encouraging a Taliban  insurgency in Pakistani tribal lands bordering Afghanistan, and  seeking to destabilise the Muslim nation of 170 million people.  But these attacks have taken place in Lahore deep in Punjab, which is really the heart of the Pakistani establishment.

And they come just as U.S. President Barack Obama has made Pakistan the central front in his war on Islamist militancy in the region, prompting some to wonder if the militants' game plan is to draw the U.S. deeper into Pakistan.

Monday's attack in the Punjab capital should prompt concern about the internal stability of Pakistan, writes Nathan Hodge in Danger Room, pointing out it came less than a month after the Sri Lankan cricket team was attacked in the same city.

"While Pakistani forces marked the recapture of the facility with celebratory gunfire, a serious question looms: Could the United States become more directly embroiled in Pakistan's internal affairs?"

Obama told an interviewer over the weekend that there were no plans to deploy combat troops inside Pakistan in the hunt for al Qaeda.

U.S. strategy in Pakistan is supposed to centre on a significant boost in civilian aid, along with continued military assistance and the occasional U.S. drone attack. "But when you say you're going after al Qaeda and its allies in the region, you are potentially expanding the roster of militant groups on the "to do" list," Hodge says.

[Photos of police with a suspected militant involved in Lahore police centre attack and an Afghan refugee protester outside a conference on Afghanistan at The Hague]

Read President Barack Obama's speech on his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan and compare it to what he said a year ago and it's hard to see how much further forward we are in understanding exactly how he intends to uproot Islamist militants inside Pakistan.

Last year, Obama said that "If we have actionable intelligence about high-level al Qaeda targets in Pakistan's border region, we must act if Pakistan will not or cannot." Last week, he said that, "Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders.  And we will insist that action be taken -- one way or another -- when we have intelligence about high-level terrorist targets."

The United States has already stepped up attacks by drone missiles on suspected militant targets in Pakistan's tribal areas since Obama took office, despite official protests by Pakistan, which says they are counterproductive since they cause civilian casualties and encourage people to support the insurgents.

The Pakistani protests began to look rather hollow after media reports that the drones were taking off from a base inside Pakistan. But that may have missed the point. The question of where the drones are based is perhaps less important than the distrust between the U.S. and Pakistani militaries on sharing intelligence about militant targets.

General Ashfaq Kayani, now head of the Pakistan Army, tells a rather revealing story about this. He is quoted in Brian Cloughley's book "War, Coups and Terror" as describing the case of a tribesman with a performing monkey who gathered an audience of turban-clad, rifle-bearing men around him in a village in 2005. The U.S. controllers of the drone mistook the event for a weapons-training session or military briefing and dropped a missile, killing many in the audience (he doesn't say what happened to the monkey). "This, said the General, was an example of lack of cultural understanding," writes Cloughley.

"The monkey incident, and other attacks by the U.S. within Pakistan," adds Cloughley, "have convinced the population of North West Frontier Province and a disturbing number of other citizens, including many in uniform, that there is nothing to be gained by supporting the United States, which they consider to be overbearing and imperceptive in its engagement with the country."

So has intelligence-sharing moved on since then?  If the United States wanted to be sure of hitting the right targets, it could ask the Pakistani military to help it guide the drones and then assess, on looking through the remote camera, whether they were on course.  Or as Foreign Minister Mahmood  Qureshi said last month, it could give Pakistan drones to carry out the task itself.

But intelligence-sharing is not easy at the best of times between different national armies. It's particularly tough when you don't trust your allies. Senior U.S. military officers say they believe elements in Pakistan's Inter-Services intelligence, or ISI, provide support to Taliban or al Qaeda militants. Has Obama worked out how to square that circle? As yet, we don't know.

The other big question is over where the United States intends to target the Islamists. U.S. officials have begun saying publicly that the Afghan Taliban are based in Quetta in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan -- quite different from the tribal areas where both the Pakistan Army and the U.S. drone missiles have been concentrated until now.  “Quetta appears to be the headquarters for the leaders of the Taliban and some of the worst people in the world,” special envoy Richard Holbrooke said in an interview with the BBC.

Does that mean the United States is preparing to expand its drone missile attacks into Baluchistan as the New York Times suggested? We don't know for sure, although some analysts have suggested the NYT report might have been deliberately leaked to put pressure Pakistan to do more to tackle the Taliban in Baluchistan.

NPR last week quoted Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies as saying that, "the main traditional center of Taliban activity is ... in the Baluchi area. It is, at this point in time, by far the most effective threat to NATO and U.S. and Afghan forces."

But ordering drone strikes in Baluchistan, writes former Pakistan ambassador Akbar Ahmed in the Huffington Post, is "not a good idea. The colonial British assiduously prevented the Baluch tribe of Baluchistan and Pashtun tribes of Southern Afghanistan and Pakistani agencies like North and South Waziristan from ever teaming up against them. I can predict that with the first drone strike in Baluchistan, America will ensure that this occurrs. As a result, the Taliban will gain new supporters and vast strategic depth."

Pakistan already faces a separate insurgency in Baluchistan by Baluchis angered by what they see as the domination of the country by Punjabis who have failed to give them a fair share of the revenues from the resource-rich province. It is quite separate from the Taliban, although -complicating the picture further - Pakistani officials complain that the Baluchistan insurgency is supported by India -- a charge India denies.

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari - who prides himself on his ability to unite Pakistan's disparate regions - his family originally came from Baluchistan while the Pakistan People's Party of his late wife Benazir Bhutto has its roots in Sindh province - has promised to try to address the grievances of the people of Baluchistan.  That's hardly in line with a stepped-up military campaign, whether by the Pakistan Army or by U.S. drone missile attacks.

So what does Obama plan to do about the Afghan Taliban, who according to his own officials operate openly in Quetta?

Pakistan has traditionally resisted going after the Afghan Taliban, arguing that they are primarily interested in regaining power in Afghanistan and do not present a global threat in the same way as does al Qaeda -- an assessment always hard to judge given the close links between the two. According to this argument, if the Taliban could be persuaded to sever ties with al Qaeda, they could be included in any eventual political settlement in Afghanistan.

Obama appeared to rule this out on Friday when he talked of "an uncompromising core of the Taliban" which would allow al Qaeda back into Afghanistan.  "They must be met with force, and they must be defeated."  How exactly will they be met with force? We don't know.

There is still much to learn about Obama's plans for Afghanistan and Pakistan and the U.S. administration itself will probably refine it as it goes along. But watching what happens in Baluchistan is as good a place to start as any. My guess is that for all the talk of bringing in Iran into a regional solution for Afghanistan, developments in Baluchistan could turn out to be more significant.

In a report released late last month, the U.S. Atlantic Council think tank warned that the ramifications of state failure in Pakistan would be far graver than those in Afghanistan, with regional and global impact. "With nuclear weapons and a huge army, a population over five times that of Afghanistan and with an influential diaspora, Pakistan now seems less able, without outside help, to muddle through its challenges than at any time since its war with India in 1971."

The report, co-sponsored by Senator John Kerry and urging greater U.S. aid, said time was running out to stabilise Pakistan, with action required within months. It's not even been two weeks since that report was released, and already events in Pakistan have taken a dramatic turn for the worse - from the confrontation between President Asif Ali Zardari and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif to Tuesday's attack on the Sri Lanka cricket team in Lahore.

"Pakistan's disintegration, if that is what is now being witnessed, is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, a riveting spectacle, and a clear and present danger to international security," said a comment piece in Britain's Guardian newspaper. "But who in the world can stop it?"

The first question to ask is whether Pakistan has now become the central front in the battle against al Qaeda and its Islamist allies in the Taliban and other militant groups. During his election campaign, President Barack Obama said the central front was Afghanistan rather than Iraq. After he took office he shifted this to "Af/Pak" with the appointment of Richard Holbrooke as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. With turmoil now reaching Punjab, the heartland of Pakistan, he might need to shift his focus even further east.

The Atlantic Council report said the United States faced challenges in three separate but related contexts: Afghanistan, the Afghan/Pakistan tribal belt, and Pakistan. "In the present conjucture, Pakistan is arguably the most important of the three." (my italics)

A second question is whether Pakistan, rather than Afghanistan, has been the primary target of al Qaeda all along. After last November's attack on Mumbai, many analysts assumed that whoever was behind it intended to draw the Pakistan Army into a confrontation with India on Pakistan's eastern border, making it easier for Islamist militants holed up on the country's western border to launch attacks in Afghanistan.  What if the end-game of the confrontation, had it materialised, been Pakistan rather than Afghanistan?

The third question, of course, is what the international community will do. The United States has already pledged financial and diplomatic support for the country's struggling civilian government; invited Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani to Washington last week for talks; dispatched Holbrooke on a tour of the region, stepped up drone missile attacks on Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, and promised to send an extra 17,000 troops to stabilise Afghanistan. It has also promised a wide-ranging review of strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, although with events moving so fast -- particularly in Pakistan - it's hard to see how this re-examination can keep pace.

The Washington Note, in a post this weekend, floated the idea that the United States might give up on Afghanistan and opt instead for a strong alliance with Pakistan.  It quotes a former top strategic adviser to an American president as saying that "ultimately the U.S. has a very, very difficult choice to make in Pakistan regarding Afghanistan, its regional neighbors, and our other allies. He said that one possible way to stabilize both countries is to make a deal with the devil and engineer a very strong, close military alliance with the Pakistan military and its intelligence operation. That means we choose Pakistan over its other regional rivals -- and that we cede Afghanistan to satellite status under Pakistan."

The writer admits he does not know whether such a plan would work - it would certainly alienate India and would possibly find few takers even in Pakistan, where anti-American sentiment is strong. But that the idea should be floated at all, more than seven years after the United States overthrew the Pakistan-backed Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, highlights quite how serious the challenges are in the region.

The aim would presumably be to reach a deal with the Afghan Taliban, allowing the United States to focus its energies in targetting al Qaeda and helping Pakistan defeat the Pakistani Taliban, who appear bent on overthrowing the government in Islamabad. In doing so, the United States would face a deterioration in its relationship with India - cultivated by the Bush administration as a counterweight to China.

Retired Indian diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar picked up a similar theme in an analysis of China's attitude to the deepening crisis in South Asia. He writes that China would be willing to see the Taliban accommodated in Afghanistan while also backing efforts to stabilise Pakistan, its traditional ally, in a realignment which would clip Indian power in the region. 

There will no doubt be more ideas in the days and weeks ahead on how to stabilise Pakistan. What is clear is that a shift in thinking has begun in which Pakistan, rather than Afghanistan, is the centre of attention. So to return to my original question. Has Pakistan become the central front in the battle against al Qaeda and Islamist militants? And if so, what are the implications?

(Photos: Marriott hotel in Islamabad/Sept 2008 and Taj hotel in Mumbai/Nov 2008)

Gaza gets 180 minute respite to shop, bury the dead - “For 180 precious minutes, Israeli warplanes and tanks held their fire, giving 1.5 million shell-shocked residents of the coastal enclave a chance to check on family members, shop for essentials and bury their dead.”

Spain’s jobless lose homes, tensions mount - “‘One day this place is going to explode,’ said unemployed waiter Miguel Roa, a Spaniard. Since December, he has lost his job and his home as well as seeing his family split as economic crisis ended 14 years of growth in Spain.

Stoic Gaza claws back to what passes for normal - “For 1.5 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza, the westward sea is like the fourth wall of a crumbling prison bounded to the north, east and south by an Israeli-led blockade, and now smashed in key places by a three-week Israeli military assault.”

Morocco tackles painful role in Spain’s past - “Slimane Betmaki smiles at the memory of the terror he inflicted on Spanish villagers on behalf of former dictator Francisco Franco.”

Pakistani newlyweds live in fear of honor killing - “Pervez Chachar and his young wife live in the police headquarters in the Pakistani city of Karachi. Their crime? They fell in love and married without their families’ permission.”

Antarctic sea creatures hypersensitive to warming - “Thriving only in near-freezing waters, creatures such as Antarctic sea spiders, limpets or sea urchins may be among the most vulnerable on the planet to global warming, as the Southern Ocean heats up.”

High-risk riches for Mexico’s “narco wives” - “Each year, dozens compete in beauty pageants in the sun-baked hills of Sinaloa state where their legendary good looks draw wealthy drug traffickers who will sometimes pluck one out and spirit her off to a mountain hide-out.”

Sharks, not humans, most at risk in ocean - “Sharks are the top of the marine food chain, a powerful predator which has no match in its watery realm, until man enters the ocean.”

Sunni anti-Qaeda sheikhs vie for west Iraq in poll - “They rose up against al Qaeda, flushed out suicide bombers and brought relative peace to western Iraq. Now, the Sunni Arab sheikhs of Anbar province want to take charge of it, through the ballot box.”

Ancient Polynesian seafaring renaissance - “A Polynesian voyaging canoe will set sail from Hawaii in March and head into the South Pacific, aiming to reach tiny Palmyra Atoll near Kiribati using only an ancient seafaring skill known as ‘wayfinding.’”

Indian Muslims under pressure in Mumbai aftermath - “The Mumbai attacks have generated a groundswell of public anger across religious and political fault lines against Pakistan for providing refuge for militants on their soil.”

Despite slowdown, polo is big business in Argentina - “Celebrities were on hand to help promote a multimillion dollar project aimed at capitalizing on Argentina’s position as the world’s top destination for polo, a game that could be described as field hockey on horseback.”

How times change. Somalia’s new Islamist president has been feted in Ethiopia, whose army drove him from power two years ago - with Washington’s backing - when he headed a sharia courts movement.

Sheikh Sharif Ahmed was greeted with a standing ovation from African Union leaders at a summit in Ethiopia, which pulled the last of its troops out of Somalia last month, leaving the government in control of little beyond parts of Mogadishu. The hardline Islamist al Shabaab militia control much of the rest of southern Somalia.

Somalia was far from being a prominent front in former President George W. Bush’s “War on Terror”, but the reverse Washington suffered there appears to be among its most dramatic. Meanwhile, the past two years have brought at least another 17,400 civilian dead in Somalia and more anarchy that has fuelled a wave of piracy.

Ahmed’s former administration was marked out by both the United States and Ethiopia as being little different to Afghanistan’s Taliban. Hardline members of the group were accused of links to al Qaeda. Now he is widely described by the international community as a “moderate” and he himself has welcomed the new U.S. stance as positive.

"One can say that the U.S. position towards Somalia has become honest," he told the Egyptian newspaper el-Shorouk. "In the framework of the Djibouti negotiations, America has become a force which supports peace."

But Somalia’s new president, chosen by parliamentary vote at the weekend, must now face the al Shabaab militia who grew out of the armed wing of the sharia courts
movement but later split with him. Al Shabaab have vowed to fight and highlighted his support from “non-believers”.

To try to bolster Ahmed, Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete, the African Union chairman, called for U.N. troops to join the 3,500-strong AU peacekeeping force in Somalia. Right now, they cannot do much more than to try to defend themselves.

But some analysts and Ahmed's aides believe that creating a U.N. force would be counterproductive because it could be seen as Western interference and encourage those who fought the invading Ethiopian troops to pursue their struggle.

Getting Somalia's clans behind the government will be another big task, a challenge previous leaders have failed to meet during 18 years of conflict.

What is the chance that Ahmed’s election as president will be able to bring peace to Somalia? What should Africa and the rest of the world do to try to make sure that happens? What do you think?