[Reader-list] ³ I tried to be not so sweet that I would be eaten whole, and not so bitter that I would be spat out. ²

[S. Jabbar]

The New Yorker
DON’T LOOK BACK
by Steve Coll
MARCH 1, 2010

he Taliban’s jihad, like rock and roll, has passed from youthful vigor into
a maturity marked by the appearance of nostalgic memoirs. Back in the day,
Abdul Salam Zaeef belonged to the search committee that recruited Mullah
Omar as the movement’s commander; after the rebels took power in Kabul, he
served as ambassador to Pakistan. “My Life with the Taliban,” published this
winter, announces Zaeef’s début in militant letters. The volume contains
many sources of fascination, but none are more timely than the author’s
account of his high-level relations with Pakistani intelligence.

While in office, Zaeef found that he “couldn’t entirely avoid” the influence
of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. Its
officers volunteered money and political support. Late in 2001, as the
United States prepared to attack Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the I.S.I.’s
then commanding general, Mahmud Ahmad, visited Zaeef’s home in Islamabad,
wept in solidarity, and promised, “We want to assure you that you will not
be alone in this jihad against America. We will be with you.” And yet Zaeef
never trusted his I.S.I. patrons. He sought to protect the Taliban’s
independence: “I tried to be not so sweet that I would be eaten whole, and
not so bitter that I would be spat out.”

Earlier this month, outside Karachi, Pakistani security services, reportedly
accompanied by C.I.A. officers, arrested the Afghan Taliban’s top military
commander, Abdul Ghani Baradar, an action that has revived questions about
the relationship between Pakistan and the Taliban. The Taliban rose to power
with extensive aid from the I.S.I.; the collaboration persisted, if less
robustly, after September 11th. More lately, the Pakistani military, of
which the I.S.I. is a component, has seemed to waver, striking against some
Taliban factions in Pakistan but tolerating or helping others. (As recently
as December, U.S. intelligence was collecting evidence of mid-level contacts
between the I.S.I. and Taliban factions fighting in Afghanistan.) Mullah
Baradar’s arrest, which was followed, last week, by the arrests, in
Pakistan, of two other significant Taliban leaders, suggests that the I.S.I.
may be further reviewing its calculations. In any event, there are few
strategic issues of greater importance to the outcome of President Obama’s
Afghan war.

Why might Pakistan consider modifying its strategy? In 2009, Islamist
militants, mainly Taliban, carried out eighty-seven suicide attacks inside
Pakistan, killing about thirteen hundred people, almost ninety per cent of
them civilians, according to the Pak Institute for Peace Studies. Last
October, Taliban raiders staged an unprecedented assault on the Army’s
General Headquarters, in Rawalpindi. Customarily, Pakistani officers have
blamed “bad” Taliban for such domestic raids, while absolving “good” Taliban
(who shoot only at infidels in Afghanistan). As the violence on Pakistani
soil intensifies, however, it would be natural for Pakistan’s generals to
question whether their jihad-management strategy has become mired in false
distinctions.

American diplomats have been warning Pakistan for years, to little effect,
that support for Islamist extremists would boomerang against its own
interests. The Bush Administration made matters worse by delivering several
billion dollars of covert aid to the I.S.I. for help against Al Qaeda
without holding it to account for coddling the Taliban and other militant
groups. The paranoid style of politics in Pakistan makes the American
version look quaint. In recent days, there has been speculation that Mullah
Baradar’s detention is evidence of some sort of diabolical I.S.I. conspiracy
to thwart reconciliation talks between the Taliban and the Afghan President,
Hamid Karzai, or to manipulate such talks, or to split the Taliban. (A
report in the Times indicates that Baradar’s arrest may have been
accidental; in Pakistan’s national psyche, however, there are no accidents.)

The Taliban are a diverse, dispersed guerrilla force with multiple command
centers and locally autonomous leaders. Nonetheless, the Afghan Taliban
leadership group in which Baradar reigned, known as the Quetta Shura, has
exercised significant authority in recent years, particularly over Taliban
fighters in southern Afghanistan, where U.S. marines have been fighting
house to house. Uncontested sanctuary for Islamist guerrilla leaders in
Pakistan contributed to the Soviet Union’s defeat in Afghanistan; the
elimination or even the reduction of such a sanctuary for the Taliban (and
Al Qaeda) would ease American burdens in Afghanistan by no small margin.
American strategists claim to see encouraging changes in Pakistan’s
behavior; intelligence-sharing between the United States and Pakistan,
severely constrained by mistrust eighteen months ago, has increased.

Unfortunately, the geopolitical incentives that have informed Pakistan’s
alliance with the Afghan Taliban remain unaltered. Pakistan’s generals have
retained a bedrock belief that, however unruly and distasteful Islamist
militias such as the Taliban may be, they could yet be useful proxies to
ward off a perceived existential threat from India. In the Army’s view, at
least, that threat has not receded. Indo-Pakistani peace negotiations that
have been in suspension since the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack are only just
re-starting. Absent a sudden breakthrough that charts the potential for
normalizing relations between Pakistan and India—a framework settlement on
Kashmir, freer trade, freer borders, and demilitarization—Pakistan’s
rationale for preserving the Taliban and similar groups is not likely to
change.

The I.S.I., by all accounts, is not a sentimental outfit. Although Zaeef
witnessed its senior commanders wail over America’s plan to overthrow the
Taliban (one I.S.I. general was “crying out loud, with his arms around my
neck like a woman”), he was also savvy enough to take note of Pakistan’s
“mixed signals.” Later, Zaeef defied the I.S.I.’s entreaties to break with
Mullah Omar and lead a “moderate” Taliban movement; the Pakistanis arrested
him, and handed him over to American soldiers, who transferred him to
Guantánamo. (He was released in 2005 and has retired in Kabul.) In his
memoir, Zaeef titles the chapter about his betrayal “A Hard Realisation.”

There will be more of those. The root problem in this murkiest theatre of
the Afghan war is not Pakistan’s national character or even the character of
its generals; rather, it involves Pakistan’s interests. The Pakistani Army
has learned over many years to leverage its grievances, dysfunction, bad
choices, and perpetual dangers to extract from the United States the
financial and military support that it believes it requires against India.
At the same time, Pakistan’s generals resent their dependency on America.
For the I.S.I. to repudiate the Taliban entirely, its officers would have to
imagine a new way of living in the world—to write a new definition of
Pakistan’s national security, one that emphasizes politics and economics
over clandestine war. For now, many Pakistani generals imagine themselves
masters of an old game: to be not so sweet that they will be eaten whole by
the United States, but not so bitter that they will be spat out. ♦