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years since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, political pundits have used, and largely overused, all the available historical references.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.

Michael Cohen and Parag Khanna have become the latest to argue, in an article in Foreign Policy, that the real focus of President Barack Obama’s battle against the Taliban and al Qaeda should be Pakistan rather than Afghanistan.

“Preventing a return of al Qaeda to Afghanistan is important, but a long, state-building mission in one of the world’s most underdeveloped countries is the costliest and least effective way to accomplish that goal,” they write.

“The even better course of action is to shift the weight of U.S. political and military efforts to Pakistan. There, the United States should continue its policy of waging drone attacks against al Qaeda and Taliban leaders. With better intelligence from the Pakistani side — as demonstrated recently — the U.S. Army can improve the accuracy of its strikes. And though drone strikes are controversial, targeting al Qaeda’s leadership is the best military strategy — and the best way to protect Americans, Afghans, and Pakistanis from terrorism. And that fight is in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.

“What’s more, though nation-building in Afghanistan is an unlikely proposition even in the long term, nation-building in Pakistan is essential — and achievable,” they say. And to achieve this, the authors argue for reconstruction efforts in the tribal areas, comparable to those planned for the Swat valley, where the Pakistan Army has just completed a military offensive. 

The argument about Pakistan rather than Afghanistan being the central front is interesting. It has been gaining currency in recent months, particularly in Britain where misgivings about the Afghan campaign tend to run higher than in the United States. Why, runs the refrain, are soldiers being sent to die in Afghanistan, when al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership are believed to be in Pakistan?

Where the article falls down is in the details.

Joshua Foust at Registan.net has already picked up on some of them. “It’s not a bad thing to argue the necessity of a focus on Pakistan. It’s just… that won’t do us much good if we also ignore Afghanistan, which is kind of what they’re arguing,” he writes.

The authors make an assumption that the Pakistan Army, which is preparing an offensive in South Waziristan, plans the same kind of “clear, hold and build” operation there as it carried out in Swat. Yet while this was appropriate for Swat, a so-called “settled area” not that far from Islamabad, there is no evidence that it would do the same in the tribal areas. These have never been governed by central authority, right back to the days when the rulers of the British Raj tried, and failed, to pacify them.

Rather what many are expecting in South Waziristan is a traditional punitive expedition against Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud – quite different from the operation in Swat where the army aimed to restore government and public services after a brief period under Taliban rule. So talking about reconstruction efforts in tribal areas like South Waziristan is at the very least, premature.

Nor do the authors deal with a widespread belief, backed by the U.S. administration, that the Afghan Taliban are based not in the tribal areas of Pakistan but in and around Quetta, the capital of its Baluchistan province. Sending U.S. drones into ”mainland Pakistan” would be quite different from dropping missiles on the tribal areas — and even these cause resentment in Pakistan, which sees them as both a breach of its sovereignty and a 21st century sledgehammer in which civilians as well as militant leaders die.

Nor do they say how the United States should deal with militant groups like the Laskhar-e-Taiba, traditionally focused on India, based in Punjab in the heart of Pakistan, and increasingly seen as a potential threat to the west.

In post 9/11 literature, it has become almost axiomatic that failed or dysfunctional states like Afghanistan are less dangerous than functioning states, since it is easier for the United States to bomb or fight its way in without a strong central government to stop it. Pakistan is a functioning state with a powerful, professional army and nuclear weapons. So even if Washington were to decide its main focus should be on Pakistan rather than Afghanistan, what exactly should it do?

The authors raise the question, but do not come up with the answers. Should we not perhaps also assume that the U.S. administration asked the same question?

(Reuters photos: Afghan villager; the widow and mother of a British officer killed in Afghanistan; U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan)

A new poll shows public opinion in Pakistan has turned sharply against the Taliban and other Islamist militants, even though they still do not trust the United States and President Barack Obama. Reporting on the poll, our Asia specialist in Washington, Paul Eckert, said the WorldPublicOpinion.org poll, conducted in May as Pakistan's army fought the Taliban in the Swat Valley, found that 81 percent saw the Pakistani Taliban and al Qaeda as a critical threat to the country, a jump from 34 percent in a similar poll in late 2007. Read Eckert's report here.

(Photo: Pakistani Taliban in Swat, 2 Nov 2007/Sherin Zada Kanju)

The poll shows a wide divergence between Pakistani public opinion and the views of the Taliban on the implementation of sharia, a religious issue sometimes cited to help explain earlier tolerance of the militants. Some 80 percent of the respondents said sharia permits education for girls, one of the first services the Taliban close down when they gain control of an area. And 75 percent said sharia allows women to work, which the Taliban do not.

Reflecting their distrust, 71 percent said they believed the Taliban would not even submit to the sharia courts that they themselves have set up or promised to install as a pure and speedy alternative to Pakistan's corrupt and inefficient civil courts. Only 14 percent supported the Taliban claim that it could provide more effective and timely justice than the state, a claim that partly helped the Islamist militants in the past (although it must be added that only 56 percent expressed trust in the civil courts). Only 9 percent said they thought the Taliban would do better at fighting corruption than the government, which got a lukewarm 47 percent. In any case, these results seem to indicate very little support for trademark Taliban promises that once seemed attractive.

If accurate, these findings mark a major shift from the results of a similar poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org in late 2007, not long after the Pakistani army flushed out Islamist militants who had taken control of the Red Mosque complex in the heart of Islambad. More than 100 died in the raid, including dozens of suspected militants and at least 10 troops. Some 64 percent said the raid was a mistake while only 22 percent supported the decision. A 60 percent majority believed that sharia should play a larger role in Pakistani law than it did at the time.

(Photo: Anti-Taliban rally in Lahore, 19 June 2009/Mohsin Raza)

Another poll, by the International Republican Institute, relativises this shift a bit. Conducted in March, before the height of the Taliban-army clash in Swat and the video of Taliban flogging a teenage local girl that reportedly turned Pakistani opinion against the militants, it shows more sympathy for the Taliban's sharia demands. While 74 percent said religious extremism was a problem in Pakistan, 80 percent supported the introduction of sharia in Swat and 72 percent supported the government peace deal with the Taliban there. Some 56 percent said they would support the Taliban if they demanded sharia in other cities such as Karachi, Multan, Quetta or Lahore.

The relationship between traditional religious views and the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan is so complex that I'm not sure any poll gives a very accurate picture. Unfortunately, neither poll examined in greater detail what those polled thought about sharia and how much of it should be applied in Pakistan. Does anyone have other poll results that give what they think is a better picture?

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UPDATE (July 2) Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid has an interesting opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times saying: "The Pakistani public, army and government have suddenly awakened to the Taliban threat. That is a crucial first step. But it will need strong international support to effectively respond."

The suicide bomb attack on the Pakistan Army in Pakistani Kashmir on Friday was not only unprecedented; it also raised questions about the state of militancy in Pakistan.

At its simplest level, the first suicide bombing in Pakistan’s side of Kashmir was seen as a reaction by the Pakistani Taliban to Pakistan’s military campaign against them in South Waziristan. “The militants are hurting and they are reacting. And this is a reaction to the successful operations we’ve had in Waziristan and we’ve had in the Malakand division,” Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told Reuters.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir, while a government official described the bomber as a Taliban militant from Waziristan.

What is puzzling, however, is the decision to target Pakistani Kashmir. While there are historical links between Pakistan’s frontier tribesmen and Kashmir dating back to partition, as discussed by Indian strategic analyst B. Raman in this article, the region has until now been the preserve of Punjab-based militant groups focused on fighting India in Indian Kashmir. The biggest of these, the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), has avoided staging attacks on Pakistani targets, and of all the militant groups operating in Pakistan, it would be expected to be critical of attacks on the military.

Why, therefore, would the Pakistani Taliban attack the Pakistan Army on the LeTs home turf? And why would Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud risk alienating the LeT — blamed for last November’s attacks on Mumbai — by sending one of his men to launch the first suicide bombing in Pakistani Kashmir and then openly claiming credit for it? An accident of the mayhem spreading in Pakistan, a sign of greater cooperation between the two groups, or a deliberate message from him to the LeT?

There has been speculation in the past among security analysts about how far the Pakistan Army and its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency have been using contacts in the LeT — which the ISI once nurtured to fight Indian rule in Kashmir — to seek information to use against the Pakistani Taliban and its al Qaeda allies.  That speculation dates back to the arrest of  senior al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah in an LeT safe house in Faisalbad in 2002.

But in the murky world of Pakistani militancy, nobody has ever been able to work out exactly how the different groups fit together, and in particular on the extent to which they shift between cooperation on a shared agenda and competition between their many different objectives - from Afghanistan to Kashmir to global jihad to targetting the Pakistani state itself.

The attack in Muzaffarabad probably provides an important clue. What is much harder, however, is to work out how to decipher that clue.

Pakistan's success in the Twenty20 cricket World Cup must rank as one of sports' more timely victories. For a state that is supposed to be at war with itself, failing and in danger of fragmentation there cannot be a sweeter way to hit back.

Younus Khan who led his unfancied team comes from the North West Frontier Province, as does Shahid Afridi whose explosive batting took Pakistan to an eight-wicket win over Sri Lanka, another nation wracked by decades of civil war, but coming out of it.

The NWFP is the frontline of the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda that has so blighted the nation, left it divided, bleeding and saddled with a huge refugee problem. Indeed Khan said the World Cup was a gift to the people of Pakistan.

Cricinfo compared Pakistan's success to a newly-reunified South Africa's victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup, saying there had not been a more timely win since then.

Younus also said  cricketing nations must resume playing in his troubled, but cricket-mad nation.

"Everybody must come to Pakistan. We need a home test series. How can we attract the youngsters? Players muct come to Pakistan."

Is the world ready to reconsider? Will India, no stranger to militancy itself, soften up? The 50-over World Cup scheduled for 2011 has been taken away from Pakistan, and is to be played now in only India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The ICC Champions Trophy that it was scheduled to host last year was shifted out, and Australia, New Zealand and England have refused to play there.

Indeed Pakistan's cricket authorities have challenged the decision to drop them from the host nations of the 2011 World Cup and  it has renewed a call to its co-Asian hosts to support its bid to hold the tournament.

Standing up for cricket in Pakistan may also be  a way to challenge the forces of darkness that is the Taliban, argues Tunku Varadarajan in a piece for Forbes. The victory was a monumental boost to a nation drained of all morale.

And cricket, he says "offers an alternative vision of civilization with which Pakistanis can contrast the viciously bleak program of the Taliban."

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)

The Pakistan Army is fighting to regain control of the Buner valley to stop a Taliban advance deeper into the heartland, a battle that could determine the course of action the United States adopts in the near future.

Two weeks is what U.S. Central Command chief General David Petraeus is giving the Pakistani establishment to destroy the Taliban in Buner, some 60 miles from Islamabad, and begin to reverse the tide in the rest of the northwest region, according to Fox News.

It quoted Petraeus as saying that the Pakistanis had “run out of excuses” and were finally serious about combating the threat from the Taliban and al Qaeda. But because of a history of offensives that were not carried to their conclusion and even ended up in a reversal of positions, the U.S.military had suspended judgment. It would wait to see concrete action by the government to finish off the Taliban who remained in control of parts of Buner.

U.S. President Barack Obama was a bit more positive, although he made clear at his news conference in Washington that he remained “gravely concerned” about Pakistan.

Obama said the Pakistani military had begun to realise the biggest threat to the country’s stability came from militants operating within, not old rival India. “On the military side, you’re starting to see some recognition just in the last few days that the obsession with India as the mortal threat to Pakistan has been misguided, and that their biggest threat right now comes internally,” Obama told a news conference in Washington.

Has there been a shift? If it has, it could certainly be of far-reaching consequence. The New York Times reported earlier this week that Pakistan had moved 6,000 troops from the eastern border with India to fight militants on its western flank along the border with Afghanistan.  These were troops that had been deployed in the east after tensions rose following the attacks in Mumbai in November which New Delhi blamed on Pakistani-based guerrillas.

Moving six thousand troops from an army of hundreds of thousands is hardly a tectonic shift in posture that remains India-focused, but at least it is a start, said  Fareed Zakaria on CNN.

And these are not just voices from abroad, which are clearly beginning to border on the hystrerical. Pakistan’s Dawn says the army shouldn’t stop at Buner, or Lower Dir, another area that it won back last weekend. It must go into the Swat region which it said was the “epicentre of militancy” and where the militants have shown little willingness to stick to a peace deal even after the administration agreed to their demand for sharia law.

[Reuters photos: Generals Petraeus and Kayani; refugees from Buner]

The United States has begun demanding rather publicly that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence make a clean break of its ties with the Afghan Taliban to help stabilise the situation in Afghanistan.

But can you force a country to act against its self-interest, despite all all your leverage, asks Robert D. Kaplan  in a piece for the Atlantic. And does it make sense for an intelligence agency to break off all contact with arguably the biggest player in the region?

Since President Barack Obama placed Pakistan at the centre of his strategy to fight the Afghan war, the debate over the ISI has gotten more open and more heated. Some Pakistani officials and experts with links to the establishment have taken exception to the United States openly painting the spy agency in enemy colours, accusing elements within it of supporting the Talibam.

Kaplan argues that Pakistan’s geography as well as a history of instability makes it almost impossible for it to cut ties to the radical Islamists. Pakistan and Afghanistan have a long and unruly border and that alone would make it necessary for security agencies to build a network of contacts with the principal players in Afghanistan.

On top of that, Pakistanis tend to see Afghanistan through the prism of the country’s unending conflict with India. “When they look to the west they envison an “islamisation” of Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries with which to face off against Hindu-dominated India to the east,” Kaplan writes.

So just as Israel will not scale back settlements in the occupied territories, frustrating U.S. peace efforts, or South Korea will from time to time extend an olive branch to North Korea, undermining U.S. efforts to contain the communist state, Pakistan, another one of America’s allies is not going to act against its core interest, he says. You can tell Pakistan to stop helping the Taliban plan and carry out operations, but you can’t tell them to cut links to the militant group altogether.

But isn’t Pakistan itself threatened by the Taliban? “Quetta Burns. Karachi on Edge. Islamabad on Alert”  ran a headline on the popular blog All Things Pakistan. Author Adil Najam says he wouldn’t recommend reading Pakistani newspapers for the faint-hearted. It’s a perfect storm, and if this doesn’t threaten Pakistan’s core interest what does?

[A protest in Karachi and Pakistan Prime Minister Gilani with chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committe John Kerry]

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]