The situation in Pakistan seems to become more complicate and uncontrollable by each day.
Last week Obama’s special envoy Holbrooke visited Pakistan. He obviously read the riot act to President Zaradari with regards to the Mumbai bombing. Just after he left the Pakistani government confirmed that ‘some’ of the Mumbai attack planning had been done on Pakistani ground. That had been rejected so far and the National Security Advisor Durrani had even been fired earlier over confirming that the surviving attacker was indeed Pakistani.
Earlier today an attack by U.S. drones on the tribal areas in Pakistan killed 25 people. A day earlier Senator Feinstein, chairwomen of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that such drone attacks are flown from bases in Pakistan. This has been rumored for quite sometime and the Pakistani people will certainly take Feinstein’s talk as confirmation.
While Prime Minister Gilani and other ministers protested against any drone attacks and denied that they are launched from within Pakistan, President Zardari was silent on the issue. So did he (and the military) knew about these drones being based inside Pakistan and left the cabinet without that knowledge? If Gilani did not know, he might now think of leaving the job to at least keep his public standing intact.
The public, which is to 90% against such U.S. strikes, will now certainly demand more than shallow explanations. I expect some rather fierce demonstrations in the coming weeks.
Most drone strikes so far have been against groups that are active in Afghanistan but have bases in Pakistan, especially the Haqqamni family enterprise which is accused of last weeks attack in Kabul. But according to the NYT today’s attack was against Baitullah Mehsud, who leads a Taliban group that fights the Pakistani government in its tribal areas.
Some of the myriad of Taliban groups fighting the Pakistani government are now also in conflict with other groups that are based in Pakistan but only fight in Kashmir and Afghanistan. They put some of their leaders on death lists. They also threatened to start attacks in Islamabad and other Pakistani population centers. Indeed today the Pakistani police found three ‘suicide jackets’ in Islamabad.
The government in internal strife, the military fighting some of the Pakistani Taliban groups but supporting others that fight in Afghanistan and various Taliban groups fighting each other. What a mess.
The only people who seem to live a peaceful life and are not touched by all the trouble are the original Taliban under Mullah Omar in and around Quetta.
I am sure they are laughing about the mess the U.S. is continuing to create in Pakistan and are discussing how they will pick up the broken pieces a few years from now when everyone else is tired of fighting. That once worked well for them in Afghanistan and sometime in the future might also be feasable in Pakistan.