For the last 7 years the Pakistan leadership has found itself in a US – Taliban sandwich, trying to hedge their bets both ways. Zardari I suspect will be no different.
With the Taliban as their proxy army, Pakistan’s government is trying to grind of the thorn of an India friendly Kabul. Pakistan is today as much as during the soviet occupation the vital logistics and hardware supplier the Taliban needs to have a fighting chance. Afghanistan’s mujaheddin have been receiving strong support from Pakistan during the Soviet days 20 years ago, an alliance which is still honoured and deemed existing in sections of Pakistan’s military and religious establishment.
At the same time Zardari must continue to appease the US by giving Al-Qaida as hard a time as possible in its heartland in the NWFP. Although the relationships between Al-Qaida and the Taliban aren’t as rosy anymore as they used to be, Zardari will somehow have to solve the conundrum of how to support the force of guerilla warriors in Afghanistan whilst simultaneously keeping the US happy by fulfilling his role as reliable ally of the US administration’s WoT, by sending his own army after their common foe, the AQ gang.
Since Pakistan shares also a border with Iran, its role as a US ally becomes even more important. With Pakistan being largely Sunni, one would think that not a great deal of sympathy exists between the people of these two countries, but quite contrary, according to this Asia Times story from May last year, large portions of the Pakistani population would not support any US attacks on its Shia neighbors.
What I found most interesting though in the above quoted AT article were the last 4 paragraphs, where the author, M K Bhadrakumar, a former Indian Foreign Service diplomat, is suggesting that the real issue for America in the US-Iran-Pakistan politics triangle is, surprise surprise, natural resources and their distribution, as in pipelines and US access to them:

…there is a sideshow to these happenings that is no less profound. US intelligence operatives must be laughing all the way to Washington that they could manage with such ease what their suave diplomats (and wily Congress members) have had a hard time achieving in recent years – arresting Islamabad and New Delhi from finalizing the $7 billion Iran-Pakistan-India gas-pipeline project. In geopolitical terms, the project holds the definite potential to forge a unified Asian energy market, with deep implications for US energy security.
Washington was increasingly finding it counterproductive to resort to arm-twisting New Delhi and Islamabad into putting the project on the back burner until such time as US-Iran relations were normalized and Washington, too, could dip into Iran’s energy reserves.
Now, just as it was becoming clear that the three regional capitals were inching toward finalization of the project at a trilateral meeting in Tehran in June, the high volatility in the security situation in the Iran-Pakistan border region puts question marks on their energy dialogue. To be sure, the pipeline project is predicated on a climate of trust and confidence prevailing among the three parties.

I reckon you are absolutely right B when you write that the primary aim for most of Pakistan’s military and political establishment is to keep Indian influence under control, be that in Kashmir or Afghanistan. And although

the PPP government has already made its intentions clear about putting its relations with India on a new footing through a “pro-India” trade policy,

the overall goal posts have not changed. Support for Afghanistan’s Taliban, aimed at unseating India friendly Kharzai in Kabul, is a definite in Pakistan’s foreign policy. The US Admin knows that, but there is precious little they can do about it.

Posted by: Juan Moment | Sep 8 2008 7:37 utc | 2