What We Need Is Involvement on Another Front

As I have said before, although the rise of the Pakistani Taliban in the Pushtun areas and in some districts of Punjab is worrisome, the cosmic level of concern being expressed makes no sense to me. Some 55 percent of Pakistanis are Punjabi, and with the exception of some northern hardscrabble areas, I can't see any evidence that the vast majority of them has the slightest interest in Talibanism. Most are religious traditionalists, Sufis, Shiites, Sufi-Shiites, or urban modernists. At the federal level, they mainly voted in February 2008 for the Pakistan People's Party or the Muslim League, neither of them fundamentalist. The issue that excercised them most powerfully recently was the need to reinstate the civilian Supreme Court justices dismissed by a military dictatorship, who preside over a largely secular legal system.

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The stock of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda plummeted after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

  Informed Comment

Maybe the sense of the level of concern is the sense of the ramp up to invading Iraq. Wagging the dog kind of sense.

Another major province is Sindh, with nearly 50 mn. of Pakistan's 165 mn. population. It is divided between Urdu-speakers and the largely rural Sindhis who are religious traditionalists, many of the anti-Taliban Barelvi school. They voted overwhelmingly for the centrist, mostly secular Pakistan People's Party in the recent parliamentary elections.

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Pakistan has a professional bureaucracy. It has doubled its literacy rate in the past three decades. Rural electrification has increased enormously. The urban middle class has doubled since 2000. The country has many, many problems, but it is hardly the Somalia some observers seem to imagine.

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The Pakistani military is the world's sixth largest, with 550,000 active duty troops and is well equipped and well-trained. It in the past has acquitted itself well against India, a country ten times Pakistan's size population-wise. It is the backbone of the country, and has excellent command and control, never having suffered an internal mutiny of any significance.

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The Pakistani Taliban amount to a few thousand fighters who lack tanks, armored vehicles, and an air force.

I’ve been feeling a sense of tilt toward the desire to throw military weight into Pakistan over the past several months – perhaps out of frustration – but it seems to be there in the reporting at least. And as we’ve seen in spades, reporting tends to follow government officialdom (anonymous, of course) lead. So maybe the sense that Juan Cole cannot make of it is merely another instance of not needing to make sense in order to thrust our military might into yet another area, and our seeming need to create never-ending war. I suppose we shall see. The lack of a formidable foe has never gotten in the way of our other military adventures.

What I see is a Washington that is uncomfortable with anything like democracy and civilian rule in Pakistan; [...] and I suspect US policy-makers of secretly desiring to find some pretext for removing Pakistan's nuclear capacity.

Bingo!

My guess is that the alarmism is also being promoted from within Pakistan by Pervez Musharraf, who wants to make another military coup; and by civilian politicians in Islamabad, who want to extract more money from the US to fight the Taliban that they are secretly also bribing to attack Afghanistan.

Advice to Obama: Pakistan is being configured for you in ways that benefit some narrow sectional interests. Caveat emptor.

Do you think Obama reads Juan Cole? He should.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.