text: "sbwhoeopWednesday August 25 2010 10:52 AMworth reading even if you know the IntelB6H: I'm sure you know the facts in this well-informed piece how Mullah Omar was saved by ISI for example but the ideaof Afghanistan as an aspect of lndo-Pak war is the best and overarching strategic concept. Sidhttp://www.newstatesman.com/asia/2010/08/india-pakistan-afghanistaniNT aLOSEThe military and the mullahsWilliam DalrymplePublished 23 August 2010The Pakistani state has a long history of nurturing jihadis as a means of dominating Afghanistan and undermining India.It is proving a fatal alliance.It May have been a nightmarish year for Pakistan but it has been a pretty good one for the country's inscrutable chief ofarmy staff the most powerful man in the Land of the Pure General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.For a start the army's response to the floods has compared well to the usual corrupt incompetence of Pakistan's civilianpoliticians guided by their chateau-hopping president Asif Ali Zardari (while minister for investment he was nicknamed""Mr 10 Per Cent""; he has now been upgraded to ""Mr 110 Per Cent""). This has led to discussion in army circles aboutwhether it is time to drop the civilian fig leaf and return the country to the loving embrace of its military. So serious is thisthreat that one of the country's most senior and well-connected journalists. Najam Sethi editor-in-chief of the FridayTimes went on the record this month to warn that elements in the army were plotting yet another coup.""( know this isdefinitely being discussed"" he said.Then there was the news that Kayani was going to be allowed to keep his job for a second term: ""an extraordinarysituation requires an extraordinary decision to overcome it"" explained a brigadier writing in the Nation newspaper.Kayani a former head of Pakistan's notorious intelligence agency the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISO can now continueto run the army and by default Pakistan's foreign policy until November 2013.But Kayani's biggest triumph this year arguably the greatest of his career was his visit to Kabul in July as the honouredguest of the Afghan president Hamid Karzai. The visit marked an important thawing in Pak-Afghan relations whichhave been glacial ever since Karzai came to power in 2001. It also coincided with the sacking of Amrullah SalehKarzai's pro-Indian and rabidly anti-ISI former security chief. Saleh is a tough Tajik who rose to prominence as amujahedin protege of Ahmed Shah Massoud the Indian-backed ""Lion of Panjshir"". The Taliban and their sponsors inthe ISI had regarded Saleh as their fiercest opponent something Saleh was enormously proud of.When I had dinner with him in Kabul in May he spoke at length of his frustration with the ineffectiveness of Karzai'sgovernment in taking the fight to the Taliban and the extent to which the ISI was managing to aid arm and train itspuppet insurgents in North Waziristan and Balochistan. Saleh's sacking gave notice of an important change of directionby Karzai. As Bruce Riedel Barack Obama's Af-Pak adviser said when the news broke ""it means that Karzai is alreadyplanning for a post-American Afghanistan"". •It seems that Kayani and Karzai are discussing some sort of accommodation between the Afghan government and ISI-sponsored elements in the Taliban maybe those of Sirajuddin Haqqani which could give over much of the Pashtunsouth to pro-Pakistan Taliban but preserve Karzai in power in Kabul after the US withdrawal. The expulsion of IndiaPakistan's great regional rival from Afghanistan or at least the closing of its four regional consulates would be a toppriority for the ISI in return for any deal that kept Karzai in power.With the US toppling of the Taliban after the 11 September 2001 attacks Pakistan's influence disappeared abruptly fromAfghanistan andIndia quickly filled the vacuum. To the ISI's horror in the early years of this decade India provided reconstructionassistance and training worth roughly £835m in total. It also built roads sanitation projects the new Afghan parliamentand free medical facilities across the country. It even offered to help train the Afghan army. Nato refused. As GeneralStanley McChrystal put it in a report last year ""while Indian activities largely benefit the Afghan people increasing Indianinfluence in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate regional tensions and encourage Pakistani countermeasures"".McChrystal was right. The Pakistanis have always been paranoid about the small Indian presence in Afghanistan. ""Wehave strong evidence [that India is] using Afghanistan against Pakistan's interests to destabilise Pakistan"" a foreignministry spokesman claimed in March. Pakistan's military establishment terrified of the economic superpower emergingto the south believes it would be suicide to accept an Indian presence in what it regards as its Afghan backyard - apotential point of retreat for the army in the event of an Indian invasion something Pakistani analysts refer to as vital""strategic depth"".According to Indian diplomatic sources there are still fewer than 3600 Indians in Afghanistan; there are only ten Indiandiplomatic officers as opposed to nearly 150 in the UK embassy. Yet the horror of being encircled has led the ISI to riskPakistan's relationship with its main strategic ally the US in order to keep the Taliban in play and its leadership underISI patronage in Quetta - a policy Kayani developed while head of the IS!. Karzai's new deal with the Pakistanis and hisclear intention to try to reach some accommodation with their proxies among the Taliban therefore represents a majorstrategic victory for Kayani and Pakistan's military as well as a grave diplomatic defeat for India.Pakistan's support for the Taliban today is only the most recent chapter of an old story of complicity between jihadimovements and the Pakistani state. Since the days of the anti-Soviet mujahedin Pakistan's army saw violent Islamicgroups as an ingenious and cost-effective means of both dominating Afghanistan (which they finally achieved with theretreat of the Soviets in 1987) and bogging down the Hindu-dominated Indian army in Kashmir (which they managedwith great effect from 1990 onwards).The former ISI director and Dick Dastardly lookalike Hamid Gul who was largely responsible for developing the strategyonce said to me: ""If the jihadis go out and contain India tying down one rnillion men of their army on their own soil for alegitimate cause why should we not support them?"" Next to Gul in his Islamabad living room lay a piece of the BerlinWall presented to him by the city's people for ""delivering the first blow"" to the Soviet empire through his use of jihadis inthe 1980s. The WikiLeaks documents suggest he is still busy liaising with jihadis in his ""retirement"".The Pakistani military top brass were long convinced that they could control the militants they have nurtured. In a tapedconversation between President Pervez Musharraf and Muhammad Aziz Khan his chief of general staff that Indiareleased in 1999 Aziz said the army had the jihadis by their ""tooti"" (balls). Yet the Islamists have increasingly followedtheir own agendas sending suicide bombers out against not just Pakistan's religious minorities and political leaders buteven the IS! headquarters. Nonetheless many in the army still believe the jihadis are a more practical defence againstIndian hegemony than nuclear weapons. For them supporting Islamist groups is not an ideological or religious whim somuch as a practical and patriotic imperative - a vital survival strategy for a Pakistani state.The army and ISI continued this duplicitous and risky policy after 11 September 2001 despite Musharrafs publicpromises to the contrary. The speed with which the US lost interest in Afghanistan after its invasion and embarked onplans to invade Iraq convinced the Pakistani army that the Washington had no long-term commitment to Karzai'sregime. This led to the generals keeping the Taliban in reserve to be used to reinstal a pro-Pakistani regime in Kabulonce the American gaze had turned elsewhere.So it was that the .ISI gave refuge to the leadership of the Taliban after it fled from Afghanistan in 2001. MullahMohammed Omar was kept in an IS! safehouse in Quetta; his militia was lodged in the sprawling suburb ofPashtunabad. There Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar presided over the Taliban military committee and war chest.Gulbuddin Hekmatyar the leader of Hizb-e-lslami was lured back from exile in Iran and allowed to operate freelyoutside Peshawar while Jalaluddin Haqqani one of the most violent Taliban commanders was given sanctuary in NorthWaziristan. Other groups were despatched to safehouses in Balochistan.By 2004 the US had filmed Pakistani army trucks delivering Taliban fighters at the Afghan border and recovering thema few days later; wireless monitoring at the US base at Bagram picked up Taliban commanders arranging with Pakistaniarmy officers at the border for safe passage as they came in and out of Afghanistan. Western intelligence agenciesconcluded that the ISI was running a full training programme for the Afghan Taliban turning a blind eye as they raisedfunds in the Gulf and allowing them to import materiel mainly via Dubai. By 2005 the Taliban with covert Pakistanisupport were launching a full-scale assault on Nato troops in Afghanistan and being given covering fire as they returnedto their bases in Pakistan.At the same time Taliban attacks on Indian interests in Afghanistan intensified beginning the process of turning theAfghan conflict like that in Kashmir into what it is today: an lndo-Pak proxy war. The Indian embassy in Kabul was twicebombed - in July 2008 and October 2009 - as were two city-centre hotels thought to have been used by the Researchand Analysis Wing (Raw) the Indian intelligence agency. Seven Indian civilians and two Indian military officers died inthe blasts.The degree to which the ISI has been controlling the Afghan Taliban has only just become clear and not just in thedocuments published by WikiLeaks. A report by Matt Waldman of the Carr Centre for Human Rights at Harvard basedon interviews with ten former senior Taliban commanders closely documents how the IS! ""orchestrates sustains andstrongly influences"" the Taliban and shows how the !SI is even represented on the Taliban's supreme leadershipcouncil the Quetta Shura.Meanwhile in the Punjab Hafiz Mohammad Saeed founder of Lashkar-e-Toiba and the man believed to have beenbehind the 2008 Bombay attacks has been allowed to continue operating from Muridke near Lahore. ""The powerfulwestern world is terrorising Muslims"" he told a conference in Islamabad this year. ""We are being invaded manipulatedand looted. We must fight the evil trio of America Israel and India. Suicide missions are in accordance with Islam. Infact a suicide attack is the best form of jihad.""At the same time as Pursuing its policy of selectively using jihadis Pakistan has appeased the US by giving generousassistance to the CIA in arresting foreign Arab al-Qaeda personnel. A major assault was also launched against both themilitants who took over the Lal Masjid and the ultra-radical Pakistan Taliban who took over the Swat Valley andannounced their intention of turning the country into an Islamic Emirate. In the course of these operations and others inthe Federally Administered Tribal Areas more than 1500 Pakistani soldiers and policemen were killed; another 250000people were made homeless in the Pak army assault on Bajaur. The IS1 has even been prepared to arrest any membersof the Afghan Taliban who didn't follow orders. Hence the seizure in Karachi in February of the Taliban second-in-command Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar along with aboutia dozen other senior Taliban whom the ISI regarded asinfringing on their hospitality by opening talks with the Karzai administration via the Saudis without ISI clearance.Yet even though the Pakistani army has conducted major offensives in six of the tribal areas the seventh NorthWaziristan has been left alone as it is home to the ISI's favourite proxies: Haqqani and Hekmatyar. Similarly Pakistan'sfoot-dragging response to the 2008 attacks on Bombay and the lack of response to the attacks on minority faith groupsin Pakistan over the past few months show that the Janus-faced policy remains in place. This summer the chiefminister of the Punjab Shahbaz Sharif was quoted heatedly denying that there were any militant groups working in thePakistani Punjab or that the Punjabi Taliban even existed. There are still in the eyes of many in the Pakistaniestablishment good Taliban and bad Taliban useful militants and expendable ones.In their eyes the ongoing defeat of Nato in Afghanistan with US and British troops suffering record casualties lastmonth is a vindication of its long-term strategy. Islamabad has succeeded in regaining influence in Afghanistan andDelhi has been checked. But India will not take this lying down. Already the Indian press has reported attempts to -resuscitate the Northern Alliance as a contingency against the Taliban's takeover of the south and here India is workingin conjuction with Russia Iran and the central Asian ""stans"". The Indian national security adviser Shivshankar Menonwas despatched to Afghanistan in March and the foreign minister S M Krishna has visited Tehran. Post-AmericanAfghanistan is looking increasingly likely to be divided between the Tajik Uzbek and Hazara north and the Pashtunsouth either formally with a partition or more likely to slip into inter-ethnic civil war with India supporting and armingthe north and Pakistan the south.As diplomacy gathers pace the Afghan Taliban who already control over 70 per cent of the country. continue toincrease their power. The most worrying development has been the spread of Taliban units to the previously peacefulnorth where they have taken over pockets of Pathan settlement around Kunduz and Badakhshan. The death of theBritish aid worker Karen Woo on 5 August was a direct result.In Pakistan. too jihadi activity is growing. Last year there were 87 suicide attacks across the country killing roughly3000 people and the ISI this week stated that for the first time in the nation's history it regarded home-grown Islamicmilitants to be a bigger threat to the integrity of the nation than India. Yet the army continues to obsess about India. In arecent speech Kayani emphasised that although the army knows the dangers of militancy it was against Indian attacksthat he was principally focused. At a time when Pakistan's economy is in crisis electricity supply increasingly erratic andthe educational system in complete breakdown Kayani has secured a huge increase in the country's defence budget.It is not a pretty picture: growing violence everywhere increasing Indo-Pak tensions and a defeat for western interests inthe region. Worst of all because the Pakistani army regards this as a major triumph it is unlikely to change its policy anytime soon.William Dalrymple's ""Nine Lives: in Search of the Sacred in Modern India"" won the first Asia House Literary Award inMay and is newly published in paperback (Bloomsbury £8.99)"