One of the arguments frequently put forward for sending more western troops to Afghanistan is that western failure there will destabilise Pakistan.

Very roughly summarised, this 21st century version of the domino theory suggests that a victory for Islamist militants in Afghanistan would so embolden them that they might then overrun Pakistan - a far more dangerous proposition given its nuclear weapons.

A slightly different but related argument is that the United States needs to show resolve in Afghanistan to convince Pakistan of its commitment to the region and encourage the Pakistan Army and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency to turn against Islamist militants it once cultivated as ”strategic assets” to be used against its much bigger neighbour India.

“Many in Pakistan have always believed the Americans are not really serious about Afghanistan. They recall that the U.S. supported Pakistan and the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s only to abandon both once the Soviets left,” writes Bruce Riedel at Brookings in a follow-up to this weekend’s attack on the Pakistan Army headquarters.

If President Barack Obama ”shows resolve in Afghanistan, Pakistanis won’t love us, but they will believe we are serious and determined to stay until a stable Afghanistan and Pakistan emerges,” he writes. “If it appears the United States cannot make up its mind about what to do, then Pakistanis will say I told you so and make their own accommodations.”

Yet the assault on army headquarters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi raises several questions both about the domino theory and argument about the United States needing to show resolve in Afghanistan.

First, does the Pakistan Army still need to be convinced of the dangers from Islamist militants after its commandos, as the Daily Telegraph put it, “were forced to storm their own headquarters” to release hostages seized in an attack on the most powerful institution in the country?

Second, the attack - which in turn raised jitters about the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons - appeared to have nothing to do with the main Afghan Taliban group fighting western forces in Afghanistan - the so-called Quetta shura led by Mullah Omar, which according to Washington is based in  Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.   

As discussed in this post and in this analysis, the gunmen involved in the Rawalpindi raid came from a nexus of militant groups linking up the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), based in South Waziristan in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, and organisations which have taken deep root in the country’s heartland Punjab province - including sectarian groups and those originally set up to fight India in Kashmir.

The Guardian quotes Pakistan Army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas as saying that five of the attackers came from Punjab while the other five were from South Waziristan. The ringleader, he said, was a Punjabi, while the operation was ordered from South Waziristan. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, but said it was carried out by its Punjab unit.

So if the threat to Pakistan comes not from the Afghan Taliban but from the Pakistani Taliban and the many militant organisations based in Punjab, can you still cite the need to stabilise Pakistan as a justification for sending more troops to Afghanistan?

There may be other arguments for sending more troops to Afghanistan, among them to prevent it again becoming a base for al Qaeda. As Reuters correspondent William Maclean writes here, analysts are still divided on whether the Afghan Taliban can be prised away from al Qaeda.

Pakistan’s former ambassador to Kabul argues in this interview with India’s Business Standard that they can. “First of all, we have to understand that the Taliban and the al Qaeda have totally different targets; and also that the Afghan Taliban are different from the Pakistan Taliban and there is evidence of this,” he says. ”We can do business with the Taliban and in order to bring back some normalcy in Afghanistan, the Taliban and the U.S. will have to do business. But we need to have some benchmarks for the conduct of the Taliban government before we do that.”

And in this article in the Washington Post, Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former director of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, suggests looking anew at the Afghan Taliban.

“Change the media theme from attacking the Taliban and calling them the terrorists to concentrating on al Qaeda and ‘foreign terrorists’,” he writes. ”By removing the stigma of terrorism from the Taliban, you can pursue meaningful negotiations with them. Mohammad Omar has never enjoyed the full support of Pashtuns. He is a lowly figure in tribal terms, and he is blamed by many of them for the calamity that has befallen Afghanistan. Reaching out to tribal leaders is what will move negotiations.”

Those are big questions about Afghanistan, but are they the same questions as those now being asked about Pakistan? Or is it time to start looking at the two countries separately again, albeit within a broad regional context that acknowledges the very complex links between different Islamist militant groups?

The ”AfPak” label has never been popular in the region itself. Is it time to ditch it?

(Reuters file photos: Nuristan in Afghanistan; U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, and Pakistani soldiers in the border areas)

An attack on the headquarters of the Pakistan Army in the city of Rawalpindi has highlighted the country’s vulnerability to a backlash from Islamist militants in the Pakistani Taliban as it prepares an offensive against their stronghold in South Waziristan. It follows a suicide bombing in Peshawar which prompted Interior Minister Rehman Malik to say that ”all roads are leading to South Waziristan.”

But what is perhaps more troubling about the attack is not so much the backlash from the Pakistani Taliban (the Tehrik-e-Taliban, or TTP)  holed up in the Waziristan tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, but rather suggestions of growing co-operation between al Qaeda-linked groups there and those based in Punjab, the heartland of Pakistan.

Analysts have long argued that the biggest danger to Pakistan would come not from the tribal areas, but from the creation of a stregthening coalition of militant groups which brought together the Pakistani Taliban, al Qaeda, and militant groups based in Punjab - which include sectarian groups and those originally set up to fight India in Kashmir.

According to the New York Times, the militants behind the attack were a mixed group from across Pakistan. It quoted an unnamed military official as saying that some came from the tribal areas, some from Punjab and some from Pakistani Kashmir.

Pakistan’s GEO TV said it had received a call from the Tehrik-e-Taliban (Ajmad Farooqi) group claiming responsibility for the attack. The caller demanded, among other things, that former president Pervez Musharraf be held accountable.

Claims of responsibility are just that - a claim that remains to be verified. But I looked up Musharraf’s autobiography “In the Line of Fire” to see what he had to say about Ajmad Farooqi. According to Musharraf, Farooqi was a senior al Qaeda operative who had been involved in the killing of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002, and subsequently was involved in two attempts to assassinate him.  Farooqi was killed in a shoot-out with Pakistani security forces in the town of Nawabshah in Sind province in 2004, after a manhunt held under the supervision of current Pakistan Army head General Pervez Ashfaq Kayani.

Here is what Musharraf had to say about Farooqi’s links to Punjab: In the manhunt, Pakistan started by tracking his phone calls. “In September 2004 we found that he was talking to two people in particular, in the Punjabi dialect of Faisalbad, the third largest of our cities in central Punjab.”

As discussed earlier on this blog, including here and here, the danger from Islamist militants in Punjab tends to be overlooked in the focus on tackling the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.  But if it turns out that those behind the attack on the Pakistan Army headquarters were not only from the remote areas bordering Afghanistan but also from the heartland of the country, then the risk to Pakistan’s stability has just got a lot bigger.

(Photos: Soldiers take position in Rawalpindi; and Pakistan army chief, General Kayani)

Afghanistan has wasted little time in accusing Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency of being behind a bomb attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul on Thursday.

Asked by PBS news channel whether Kabul blamed Pakistan for the bombing, Afghan ambassador to the United States Said Jawad said: ”Yes, we do. We are pointing the finger at the Pakistan intelligence agency, based on the evidence on the ground and similar attacks taking place in Afghanistan.”

But what has been more striking is how careful India has been not to assign blame too quickly.  Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao, the country’s top diplomat, visited Kabul on Friday but said it was too early to say who was responsible for the bombing.

“I think the investigation should be completed,” she said when asked if India thought Pakistan was behind the attack. “Whoever is responsible for this attack is against peace, is against democracy, is against people of Afghanistan and against the people of India.”

India has in the past accused the ISI of being behind attacks on Indian interests in Afghanistan. An attack on the same Kabul embassy last year killed 58 people. And as discussed regularly on this blog, rivalry between Indian and Pakistan over Afghanistan complicates U.S. efforts to stabilise the country no matter how many extra troops it sends.

For a sense of deja vu, see this post from last August on India-Pakistan rivalry in Afghanistan, this post on the United States often conflicted approach in its dealings with the ISI, and this post from December asking whether it still made sense for President Barack Obama to send more troops to Afghanistan after last year’s attack on Mumbai torpedoed hopes of a regional settlement.

So what is to be expected as a result of this latest bombing on the Indian embassy in Kabul?  Will it automatically lead to a fresh increase in tensions between India and Pakistan, or at the very least stall tentative attempts to repair relations soured by the Mumbai attack?

The answer to that is not as obvious as it might seem.

Pakistan’s civilian government, which says its wants to hold peace talks with India, is already embroiled in an awkward stand-off with the Pakistan Army over provisions in the U.S. Kerry-Lugar aid bill which appear to curb the power of the military. So India might judge that now is not the right moment to raise the temperature.

Complicating the picture further is increasing violence within Pakistan itself - as highlighted by Saturday’s attack by suspected Taliban militants on the Pakistan Army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi, a day after 49 people were killed by a suicide car-bomber in the city of Peshawar. Do also read this chilling BBC account about the growth of militancy in south Punjab, in the heartland of Pakistan.

Add to that uncertainty about Obama’s yet-to-be-completed review of strategy in Afghanistan, along with reports that the insurgency there is both growing and becoming increasingly independent of leaders in Pakistan, and you get one of the more fluid and volatile mixes in the history of relations between India and Pakistan.

All that makes it impossible to predict with any certainty the impact of the Kabul embassy bombing on relations between the two countries. One to watch closely in the days and weeks ahead.

(Photos: Site of bomb blast in Kabul; Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao; soldiers take position in Rawalpindi)

According to Dawn newspaper, the Pakistan Army is poised to launch a major military operation in South Waziristan, stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban.

It quotes senior military and security officials as saying that the army would launch what it called “the mother of all battles” in the coming days.

“If we don’t take the battle to them, they will bring the battle to us,” it quotes a senior military official as saying of the militants. “The epicentre of the behemoth called the Taliban lies in South Waziristan, and this is where we will be fighting the toughest of all battles.”

“For three months, the military has been drawing up plans, holding in-depth deliberations and carrying out studies on past expeditions to make what seems to be the last grand stand against Pakistani Taliban in the Mehsud heartland a success,” it says.

“We are ready. The environment is ready,” it quotes the senior officer as saying. “It will not be a walkover. This is going to be casualty-intensive hard fighting. The nation will have to bear the pain,” said another officer.

The Pakistan Army is not saying anything in public, and information about its operations in Waziristan is hard to come by since the area is so remote and inaccessible.

But any ground offensive into South Waziristan would be a major escalation in the Pakistan Army’s battle against the Pakistani Taliban, dwarfing its operation earlier this year to clear militants out of the Swat valley northwest of Islamabad.

The army has been reluctant to send ground troops into South Waziristan, instead aiming to seal off the area and rely on airstrikes to target militants. But talk of a possible ground offensive has risen after two bomb attacks last weekend raised fears the Pakistani Taliban were recovering from the death of their leader, Baitullah Mehsud, in a U.S. missile strike in August.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik told me earlier this week that Pakistan was considering whether it needed to launch a full-scale military operation against the Pakistani Taliban, who he described as “the front face of al Qaeda”.

And according to Dawn, “Thousands of army soldiers - two divisions - are now sitting on the fringes of the Mehsud mainland waiting for orders from the high command to move in.”

South Waziristan is believed to be heavily defended; it is larger than Swat and more inaccessible. Its people have always been hostile to outsiders, unlike Swat which was once a tourist paradise before it was overrun by Taliban militants. So any ground offensive would likely cause heavy casualties.

The general view has also been that the army has been running out of time to launch a ground offensive before the winter snows make operations extremely hard and would defer any big moves until the spring. That could still be the case, if it judges that a combination of air attacks and missile strikes by U.S. drones - the latest reported casualty from these was Uzbek militant leader Tahir Yuldashev - is enough to keep the militants at bay and stop them from bombing Pakistani cities.

But Malik said Pakistan could even launch an operation in winter if needs be. “Even in the winter, even before starting winter … if we feel appropriate that this operation is unavoidable, yes, we will consider that,” he said.

The Pakistan Army has years of experience of fighting in winter conditions - along with the Indian Army it became a world expert in high-altitude warfare in the conflict over the Siachen region which erupted in 1984, and it also has troops posted in the mountains along the Line of Control dividing Kashmir - although there has been a ceasefire there since 2003.

So it is not out of the question for the Pakistan Army to launch an offensive that drags into the winter. According to the Dawn report, temperatures in Waziristan can drop to 20 degrees below freezing, with snow setting in towards the end of November — fairly brutal conditions for an offensive, but less hostile in terms of weather than it has had to deal with in Siachen over the years.  And Dawn quotes military strategists as saying the weather problem would hit the militants more than the troops, although the former would have the advantage of knowing their terrain.

In its battle against Islamist militants, Pakistan has concentrated on tackling the Pakistani Taliban, which threaten the country directly. That has annoyed the United States, which wants Pakistan to move as well against militants fighting western troops in Afghanistan, including the Afghan Taliban which it says are based in Quetta, in Baluchistan province. India is pressing for action against militant groups based in Pakistan’s Punjab province, including the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group it blames for last year’s attack on Mumbai.

But for now, attention within Pakistan seems to be turning to Waziristan for what could turn out to be the toughest military campaign in the whole of the Afghanistan and Pakistan theatre.

(File photos:Pakistani soldier in Swat; Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Kayani with U.S. General David Petraeus; Taliban fighters; author in Siachen)

The first big suicide bombing in Pakistan this week since the slaying of Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in a U.S.-missile strike had a particularly nasty edge to it.

The attack in Torkham, a post on the main route for moving supplies to NATO and American forces in Afghanistan, took place just before dusk, as a group of tribal police officers prepared to break the Ramadan fast on the lawn outside their barracks.

Because the attacker, who by most accounts appeared to be a teenager, offered food, he was welcomed to join the gathering, in accordance with local traditions during the fasting month, the New York Times reported, citing one of the police officers who was there at the time.

So the attacker walked in and detonated his explosives among the policemen, killing 22 people.

A militant group affiliated with the Taliban claimed responsibility for the bombing, which came two days after the Taliban confirmed Baitullah’s death, after weeks of denials, and announced the appointment of one-time aide Hakimullah Mehsud, as his successor.

The question being asked is whether this is the face of a more ruthless and vicious Taliban under Hakimullah,  who, by all accounts, appears to be a young, battle-hardened ambitious leader.

Time magazine in a piece on Hakimullah said it would appear that by removing Baitullah, “Pakistan and its ally, the U.S. may have rid themselves of one problem; only to gain another.”

Hakimullah, according to journalists’ accounts who have met him, comes across as a fiercely ambitious young commander, keen to show his skills with a range of weapons as well as high-speed mountain driving.

A BBC reporter recalls a particularly bone-chilling ride he had with Hakimullah on his pickup about two years ago.

“To demonstrate his skill with the vehicle, he drove like a man possessed, manoeuvring around razor sharp bends at impossible speeds,” the reporter said.  Hakimullah finished the demonstration by braking inches short of a several hundred foot drop.

“While the rest of us sat in stunned silence, he just laughed chillingly and stuck the car in reverse to smoothly continue the journey.”

Another journalist said one of the first things that struck him about Hakimullah during a meeting last year was his ambition and desire to be in a leadership position.

In fact the whole trip for television journalists to the Orakzai tribal agency, partly controlled by Hakimullah, was aimed at introducing the fiery Taliban fighter and to air his views on religion and politics and his ambition to take the movement beyond the Federally Administered Tribal Areas to mainland Pakistan, the journalist recalls in this piece for The Dawn.

One of the first things the new amir of the Taliban will do is to identify the moles within the group who are believed to be giving information to Pakistani and U.S. forces which is largely responsible for the high success rates of drone strikes, according to Indian intelligence expert B.Raman.

[Photograph of Taliban commander Hakimullah Mehsud and a suicide bombing at Torkham on the Afghan-Pakistan border]

Bruce Riedel, who led a review of the “Af-Pak” strategy for the Obama administration, says the United States must now target Mullah Mohammad Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, following the apparent death of the chief of the Pakistani Taliban this month.

The one-eyed, intensely secretive founder of the Afghan Taliban is a much more elusive and important player in the “terror syndicate” attacking Pakistan, Afghanistan and the NATO mission in Afghanistan than Baitullah Mehsud, reportedly killed in a U.S. drone strike, Riedel says.

“Under his leadership, the Afghan Taliban has returned from near total defeat in 2001 to threaten the survival of the NATO effort in Afghanistan and indeed the future of the alliance,” Riedel, a former CIA officer and now a scholar at Brookings, writes here.

In 2003, the Taliban was active in only 30 of Afghanistan’s 364 districts; now it is a player in 160. “For too long the self-described Commander of the Faithful has been on the rampage. Now is the time for Washington and Islamabad to cooperate to shut him down.”

Going after Mullah Omar and other leaders with strong links to al Qaeda such as Jalaluddin Haqqani is Pakistan’s next test, the Los Angeles Times wrote on Monday.  Both these leaders have directed their efforts at Afghanistan, rather than Pakistan, and Islamabad as a result or otherwise hasn’t really focused on them, it said.

So does this mean the United States is building a case for widening military operations inside Pakistan to include Baluchistan, where Mullah Omar is believed to have long operated from, heading a leadership council known as the Quetta shura? U.S. drone strikes have so far been confined to the sparsely populated Federally Administered Tribal Areas in the northwest and even these have evoked such revulsion among Pakistanis that America is now considered the number one threat to Pakistan, as a poll we wrote about earlier showed.

And so to take the covert “Predator war” to Baluchistan would seem to be crossing another red line in the minds of a majority of Pakistanis already seething at the assault on its sovereignty. “The moral, legal and political dimension of it  (drone attacks) remains a dilemma for the government and parliament. It is difficult for national pride of a nascent nuclear power to swallow that it allows frequent infringement of its sovereignty by an ally,” former Pakistani army lieutenant general Talat Masood wrote in The News

 Riedel doesn’t obviously spell out how the United States should go about taking on Mullah Omar, but is a drone strike possible in  a city such as Quetta ?  The risk of civilian casualties would seem to be high in any such operation either in Quetta or the teeming Afghan settlements and refugee camps in and around the city and nearby the Afghan  border.

And above all the use of such missile strikes remains a matter of debate. Micah Zenko, a scholar at the Council of Foreign Relations, says if you were to measure the strikes against President Barack Obama’s stated objective of disrupting and dismantling al Qaeda and those responsible for 9/11 then the strikes must be judged to be ineffective. At best, he argues, it can be part of a national strategy toward Pakistan, and that is something that still hasn’t been put on the table.

“There’s almost no U.S. military policy on Pakistan. There’s limited foreign internal assistance in terms of counterinsurgency training. There are a very small number of [U.S.] troops [inside Pakistan]. The other part is large payment for the Pakistani army to conduct operations. That’s the extent of our military policy.”

[File photograph of a newspaper notice of the most wanted men including Osama bin laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar and  2) Baitullah Mehsud at a news conference last year]

Who is Pakistan’s biggest threat? Not the Taliban, not even India, but the United States, according to an overwhelming majority of Pakistanis surveyed in a poll just out.

On the eve of the 62nd anniversary of Pakistan’s creation, the Gallup Pakistan poll offers a window into the mind of a troubled, victimised nation. And it surely must make for some equally uncomfortable reading in the United States, led at this time by a president who has sought to reach out to the Muslim world and distance himself from the foreign policy adventurism of his predecessor.

Here is the poll summary and here the full poll conducted by Gallup Pakistan, an affiliate of Gallup International. The poll was commissioned by Al Jazeera and here are some highlights:

Fifty-nine percent of Pakistanis believe the United States poses the greatest threat to the nation, despite the billions of dollars of military and development aid. (There is, of course, a separate debate on about how heavily the previous administration skewed the aid towards the military instead of schools and hospitals as highlighted in a report by the influential Center for American Progress but that at some other point.)

About 18 percent of those polled said they felt most threatened by India. The number is not as high as you would ordinarily expect, given that the Pakistani establishment has long portrayed the neighbour as the existential threat. Is there an opportunity here? Will the peacemakers on the two sides seize on this to build greater people-to-people contacts?

Anyway to get back to the poll, only 11 percent thought that the Taliban were the greatest threat, despite all the bombings and suicide attacks they have carried out across the country. To a separate question, some 43 percent supported dialogue with the Taliban.

Is there a huge disconnect then? While America says the next major attack is likely to originate from the Taliban - al Qaeda strongholds in Pakistan’s northwest, quite a substantial number of Pakistanis do not think them to be a threat, and would like talks to resolve the problem.

“Drone anger” or public fury over U.S. Predator strikes inside Pakistan seems to be especially responsible for America’s unpopularity. A massive 67 percent of those polled said they opposed U.S. military operations on Pakistani soil.

Can America then really fight this war, with the Pakistani people so dead against it? For the United States to become even more hated than India, it takes quite a doing, the Gulf-based The Nation wrote.

“If it is less popular in Pakistan than India is, it must indeed be doing something wrong. Billions of dollars in aid and untold numbers of visits by US officials have failed to win Pakistan’s full support for efforts to defeat the Taliban,” the paper said.

This poll was conducted on July 26-27 in all four provinces of the country. Which means it was done before the reported death of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in a U.S. drone strike. That has been widely welcomed in Pakistan and some people think it may blunt some of the hostility to U.S. drone attacks as The Times notes.

But it is hard to see the numbers drop dramatically, especially given that the Pakistani Taliban is not about to be finished despite the loss of its powerful leader.

So where do we go from here?  Rob Asghar, a Pakistan-American writing in the Huffington Post, kicks the ball back at Pakistanis, saying ultimately nobody can help them save themselves. Pakistan must stop thinking of itself as the victim, blaming first India, and now the United States for all its ills.

“As a Pakistani-American, let me offer my own poll response: The biggest threat posed to Pakistan comes not from the U.S. Not from the Taliban. And not from India.”

“No, the biggest threat to Pakistan comes from Pakistanis. The threat comes from the actions of some, and the inaction of others.”

[File photo of a protest in Lahore and U.S. Central Command chief General David Petraeus and Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Kayani]

The obvious question to ask about the apparent death of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in a U.S. drone attack (apart from the question of proving his death) is what, or who, is next? Does the Pakistan Army still go into South Waziristan to fight the Taliban, or does it consider it “mission accomplished”? And after apparently eliminating a militant leader who had focused on targetting Pakistan, will it now go after other militants whose main area of operation is Afghanistan?

As discussed in my last post, Pakistan’s military offensive in South Waziristan was framed in the context of a punitive mission against Mehsud based on Raj-era notions of retribution, and was therefore quite different from its operation in Swat, which aimed to re-occupy territory seized by the Taliban and restore the writ of the state.  So if Mehsud is indeed dead, the Pakistan Army may already have met its objective.

It would probably need new orders to do more - and however much analysts argue that the Pakistani military still calls the shots on foreign and security policy - Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani has been something of a stickler in insisting that he takes his orders from the civilian government.

So even on this narrow technical definition, the decision about what happens next will be political rather than military - albeit a decision in which the army has a powerful say.

But at a much broader level, the decision will define Pakistan’s approach to Islamist militants.

According to the New York Times, the death of Mehsud is likely to mean that Islamabad will come under even greater U.S. pressure to go after militants who fight the United States and its allies in Afghanistan. These include the Afghan Taliban, believed by Washington to be based in Quetta in Baluchistan, and the Haqqani network founded by Afghan warlord Jalauddin Haqqani, based in North Waziristan.

And that could be much trickier. The Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network were used by Pakistan in the past to control Afghanistan and many analysts think it is reluctant to turn against them now as long as it believes it can use them to counter India’s growing influence there.

American journalist Nicholas Schmidle argues in Slate that Mehsud was an easier target since he had alienated both the United States and Pakistan.

“Now the hard part begins,” he writes. “Since the CIA has demonstrated its ability to pinpoint “high-level targets,” it will want to go after other top Taliban leaders in Pakistan, such as Maulvi Nazir in South Waziristan and Jalaluddin Haqqani in North Waziristan. But Pakistan’s military and security establishment perceives both men, who focus their fighting in Afghanistan and not in Pakistan, as national security assets more than threats. And there’s no magic drone strike to fix that.”

And the hard part may take time. There are many, many other pieces of the jigsaw that have to be fitted in first. Inside Pakistan, the civilian government, the army and public opinion would all have to rally behind any decision to widen the scope of the country’s fight against the Taliban. And beyond  Pakistan, the likely outcomes of the U.S. military offensive in Afghanistan to the west and the tortuous peace process with India to the east have yet to become clear.  Expect much uncertainty before the broader picture takes shape.

(File photos: Pakistani soldier on Afghan border; General Kayani with Prime Minister Gilani)

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.”