Five years ago, on a trip to South Asia, I asked a former Pakistani ambassador where Osama bin Laden was hiding. The ambassador replied that he would be found in a safe house built by Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, near a military headquarters. I was taken aback, but the ambassador expressed complete confidence in this speculation. Clearly, Pakistanis understood their complex relationships with terror and with Washington; Americans took years to catch up.
Ahmed Rashid, one of Pakistan’s premier journalists and analysts, knows the region’s pressures better than most. He literally wrote the book on the Taliban and now has added a superb work on the future of Pakistan, a country many people deem the world’s most dangerous.“Pakistan on the Brink” depicts a nation with a severe socioeconomic crisis, and with political leadership that has neither the courage nor the will to carry out essential reforms and is building the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal on the globe. The U.S.-Pakistan relationship is in a state of virtual meltdown, Rashid rightly contends, with both sides to blame.
"Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan" by Ahmed Rashid
The relationship is so bad that “the United States and Pakistan are just short of going to war,” Rashid writes.
Much of the growing enmity between the two countries can be traced to the U.S. raid that killed bin Laden — and that’s where Rashid begins his tale. It did not enhance trust for the United States to discover that the al-Qaeda leader was hiding less than a mile from Pakistan’s premier military academy and had been there running his global terror network for at least five years. According to The Washington Post’s reporting on the material found in his hideout, he was in regular communication with other jihadists, including the Afghan Taliban leader, Mohammad Omar. His hideout had been built by a contracting firm often used by the ISI.
Rashid argues that there is a complex syndicate of jihadi terrorists operating today in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda gets the most attention in the United States, but it is a relatively small organization in a much larger network. Lashkar-i-Taiba, the militant Islamist terror group that attacked Mumbai in 2008, for example, has a much bigger and very overt presence in Pakistan. It routinely holds large demonstrations in Pakistan’s cities that attract tens of thousands of supporters.
Its leader, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, openly mourned bin Laden’s death last May and called for revenge on America. He and bin Laden had been close partners in terror stretching back to the 1980s, when the Saudi helped fund the creation of Lashkar-i-Taiba. The two men were in communication until the SEALs killed bin Laden in his hideout in Abbottabad, according to the materials found there.
So while al-Qaeda may be on the defensive thanks to U.S. drones and Navy SEALs, Rashid writes that its much larger allies are thriving and widening the terrain for its operations.
Pakistan is the epicenter of this jihadist syndicate, and Rashid does a great job of describing how the Pakistani army and the ISI helped build this Frankenstein’s monster over the past four decades. As he notes, the obsession of Pakistani generals with India has been the driving force behind this creation, which is increasingly out of control. But as he establishes, the army has not changed its fundamental approach of supporting jihad. We now know that the Mumbai plot, for example, was led by Lashkar-i-Taiba but funded by the ISI and inspired by al-Qaeda. The Pakistani American who helped plan the attack, David Headley, has confessed in court to how this deadly cocktail was put together.
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