Pakistan...the Taliban's Safe Haven

“I cannot lie to you,” Namdar said, smiling at last. “The [Pakistani] army comes in, and they fire at empty buildings. It is a drama — it is just to entertain.”

Entertain whom? I asked.

“America,” he said.

I just found an interesting article from the New York Times about Pakistan's double game with the US. The article explains how Pakistan would proclaim a new offensive or whatever against the taliban but in reality would do nothing. How Peshawar is the new captial of talistan and basically resembles Kabul back in the 90s.

It's a long article but I think it's worth the read. Here's an excerpt New York Times

That American and Pakistani soldiers are fighting one another along what was meant to be a border between

allies highlights the extraordinarily chaotic situation unfolding inside the Pakistani tribal areas, where

hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban, along with Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters, enjoy freedom

from American attacks.

But the incident also raises one of the more fundamental questions of the long war against Islamic

militancy, and one that looms larger as the American position inside Afghanistan deteriorates: Whose side

is Pakistan really on?

The terrorist's....

But as the incident on the Afghan border suggests, little in Pakistan is what it appears. For years, the

survival of Pakistan’s military and civilian leaders has depended on a double game: assuring the United

States that they were vigorously repressing Islamic militants — and in some cases actually doing so —

while simultaneously tolerating and assisting the same militants. From the anti-Soviet fighters of the

1980s and the Taliban of the 1990s to the homegrown militants of today, Pakistan’s leaders have been both

public enemies and private friends.

When the game works, it reaps great rewards: billions in aid to boost the Pakistani economy and military

and Islamist proxies to extend the government’s reach into Afghanistan and India.[...]

A few days into the military operation, the photographer Lynsey Addario and I, dressed in traditional clothes and with a posse of gunmen protecting us, rode into Khyber agency ourselves. “Entry by Foreigners Prohibited Beyond This Point,” the sign said on the way in. As we drove past the dun-colored buildings and corrugated-tin shops, every trace of government authority vanished. No policemen, no checkpoints, no guards. Nothing to keep us from our appointment with the Taliban.

It was a Friday afternoon, and our guides suggested we pull off the main road until prayers were over; local Taliban enforcers, they said, would not take kindly to anyone skipping prayers. For a couple of hours we waited inside the home of an uncle of one of our guides, listening to the muezzin call the locals to battle.

“What is the need of the day?” a man implored in Pashto over a loudspeaker. “Holy war — holy war is the need of the day!”[...]

Pulling into Namdar’s compound, I felt transported back in time to the Kabul of the 1990s, when the Taliban were at their zenith. A group of men and boys — jittery, clutching rifles and rocket-propelled grenades — sat in the bed of a Toyota Hi-Lux, the same model of truck the Taliban used to ride to victory in Afghanistan. A flag nearly identical to that of the Afghan movement — a pair of swords crossed against a white background — fluttered in the heavy air. Even the name of Namdar’s group, the Vice and Virtue brigade, came straight from the Taliban playbook: in the 1990s, bands of young men under the same name terrorized Afghanistan, flogging men for shaving their beards, caning women for walking alone and thrashing children for flying kites.

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