The Wrath of Khan

Pakistani cricket legend, Imran Khan, who led Pakistan to the World Cricket Championship in 1992 before turning to politics, is calling on Pakistan to sever its commitment to the war on terror in Afghanistan. Khan argues that by deploying military forces and launching air raids against Pashtuns, Pakistan is stirring up a hornet's nest that did not previously exist:

"The Afghan mess had spilled over to Pakistan. Now we’ve a situation where the entire Pashtun population has turned against us...We had no violent Taliban before Islamabad allied with the US’s Afghan disaster."

One of the assumptions about the war that the mainstream media and beltway politicians have rammed down our throats is that a revived Taliban could destabilize Pakistan, a nation with nuclear weapons. Nothing could be more backwards. The Taliban have no imperialist designs on Pakistan. Their attacks on Pakistani military outposts are part of the ongoing military conflict that Khan notes the Pakistanis have unwittingly stumbled into.

There was a time when Pakistan's lack of cooperation in the war on terror used to infuriate me. But ultimately, northwestern Pakistan is full of fundamentalist Pashtuns who mostly want to be left alone. Involving the Pakistani government in air raids are about as popular an idea there as if China asked the U.S government to carpet bomb manufacturing plants in Ohio. If we are really worried about destabilizing Pakistan, we should ask them to publicly withdraw from the Afghanistan campaign. We would undoubtedly still receive secret intelligence from the ISI, which is more useful to us than a couple thousand hapless Pakistani soldiers anyway.

Update: For more on the deteriorating situation in Pakistan, read this account of the recent increase in terror attacks, some deep inside the country, which have killed over 2,000 people so far.