Word: taliban
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...wake of the 9/11 attacks, then President Pervez Musharraf had little choice but to support the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan - despite his misgivings over Washington's strategy there. Indeed, Pakistan had helped install the Taliban in Kabul in 1996, to ensure that the nation's western flank was controlled by a friendly regime. Even a month after the U.S. air campaign in Afghanistan began in October 2001, President Musharraf declared publicly that his government had no intention of breaking diplomatic ties with the Taliban, saying the ties provided a "useful diplomatic window" and claiming that the relationship was "fruitful...
...Pakistan has cooperated extensively with U.S. efforts to target al-Qaeda militants on its own soil, facilitating the capture of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and scores of other operatives. Its army has lost several hundred men in clashes with various Pakistani Taliban groups in the tribal areas and the Swat Valley. Still, it's no secret that the Afghan Taliban's leadership continues to operate from the Pakistani city of Quetta, and reports of ongoing Pakistani backing for Taliban efforts in Afghanistan have surfaced regularly in recent years...
...that the U.S. will leave Afghanistan sooner or later, and it's not likely to trust Washington to secure Pakistani interests there. As long as Pakistan remains locked in strategic competition with India, it will seek influence in Afghanistan - an objective that arguably aligns it more closely with the Taliban than with the Karzai government...
...None of this necessarily puts the U.S. and Pakistan on a collision course. The Obama Administration has begun to talk of reconciliation with moderate Taliban elements, and some in the Pakistani leadership may be hoping to move Washington closer to the approach urged by Musharraf at the very beginning of the war: separating the Taliban from al-Qaeda...
...Those in Pakistan's security establishment who maintain ties with the Taliban may, as Musharraf did in 2001, see Pakistan serving as a useful interlocutor with a movement that remains central to Afghanistan's fate. When the New York Times reported last week on the ongoing links between the ISI and the Taliban, it also reported that the British government "has sent several dispatches to Islamabad in recent months asking that the ISI use its strategy meetings with the Taliban to persuade its commanders to scale back violence in Afghanistan before the August presidential election there...