Quotes of the Day

Pakistan is not betting on a U.S. victory in Afghanistan, nor is it going out of its way to help achieve one. Instead, say analysts and former top officials in Islamabad, Pakistan views the conflict in Afghanistan through the lens of its own national interests and its conflict with India — and it will act accordingly, prioritizing securing its own interests in Afghanistan's future. And that could be bad news for a U.S.-led military campaign that depends on Pakistan's help for thwarting the Afghan insurgency.

Pakistan officials expressed anxiety two weeks ago when 4,000 U.S. Marines were sent into Helmand province in the first major offensive under the command of President Barack Obama's new Afghanistan commander, General Stanley McChrystal. McChrystal was forced to visit Pakistan on July 26 to allay its security chiefs' fears that a squeeze on Taliban militants in Helmand could push them across the border and further destabilize Pakistan.

Helmand shares a porous border with Baluchistan, the vast and restive southwestern province of Pakistan where for years the military has been battling — under a thick media blackout — Baluch separatists in the mountains. Having committed troops to fighting the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas of the northwest and insisting on maintaining a heavy troop concentration along the Indian border in the east, Pakistan complains that it lacks the troops to rebuff a Taliban spillover from Helmand.

"What the Pakistanis are asking the Americans to do is encircle [the Taliban militants] within Afghanistan instead," to prevent them from crossing the border, says a senior Western diplomat familiar with the discussions. Washington, for its part, has been urging both India and Pakistan to agree to a reciprocal reduction of troop levels along their mutual border, in order to free up more Pakistani forces to tackle the Taliban. But that may be missing the point: one of the reasons for the divergent strategic priorities between Washington and Islamabad is that Pakistan sees Afghanistan as another theater of its conflict with India.

"There is a genuine concern that when there's a military operation across the border, there is a spillover," says Ayesha Siddiqa, an independent Pakistani military analyst. But of equal concern may be the prospect that a weakened Taliban may actually diminish Pakistan's influence in Afghanistan. "Is it," says Siddiqa, "less to do with the actual movement of militants into Pakistan, and more with the fact that greater U.S. military pressure in Afghanistan may lead to a situation where Pakistan is left with no space in the country?"

Pakistan has certainly been ambivalent about the U.S. invasion that took down the Taliban regime at the end of 2001. Rustam Shah Mohmand, a former Pakistani ambassador to Afghanistan, says that Islamabad was "party to the dismantling of the Taliban regime and creating the conditions for the emergence of Hamid Karzai as Afghan President." But it is widely suspected that Pakistan has never really relinquished the Afghan Taliban as a proxy for pursuing its own long-term interests in Afghanistan, since it regards Karzai as an ally of its enemy India. Thus Pakistan's own campaign against the Taliban on its soil has focused on those groups directly attacking the Pakistani state, while largely turning a blind eye to militant groups that simply use its soil as a base from which to wage war on Western forces in Afghanistan.

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Western intelligence agencies suspect that Mullah Omar, leader of the Afghan Taliban, is hunkered down in a sanctuary near the city of Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, with other key members of the Taliban leadership.

Pakistani authorities vehemently deny that the Afghan Taliban's key leadership structure is based in Quetta. And it stresses that limited resources force it to prioritize dealing with the Pakistani Taliban's domestic insurgency. "The situation is that Pakistan cannot fight all kinds of Taliban militants at once," says Hasan Askari-Rizvi, a political and military analyst. "Those Taliban who are challenging the Pakistani state's authority, they will be dealt with first." But critics believe that elements within the military establishment continue to discreetly support insurgent groups operating across the border in order to maintain Pakistan's strategic leverage in Afghanistan.

Pakistan's security establishment has never embraced the Karzai government, which it sees as dominated by the predominantly ethnic Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara forces of the India-backed Northern Alliance. And it fears that India is expanding its influence there through massive development projects and by using Afghanistan as a base from which to destabilize Pakistan.

Although Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has broken with his predecessor, General Pervez Musharraf, in embracing Karzai as an ally, his government continues to regard Afghanistan skeptically. Last week Interior Minister Rehman Malik accused the Karzai government of colluding with India to secretly back the Baluch insurgency inside Pakistan.

The Taliban regime had given Pakistan what local military strategists termed "strategic depth." A friendly regime in Kabul helped Islamabad counter New Delhi's clout in the region and helped relieve a sense of being encircled by India and its allies. Pakistani officials fear that as Pashtun political power has receded in Afghanistan, New Delhi's influence has grown at Islamabad's expense. It is widely alleged by Pakistani officials that India is using its four consulates along Pakistan's western border to foment the Baluch insurgency. Recent local propaganda has gone further, alleging that even the Taliban in Swat enjoys Indian backing — rumors that have helped rally public support against the militants.

The deeper Pakistani fear about the U.S. offensive is that the more it succeeds, the less chance Pakistan will have of influencing events in Afghanistan after the Americans and their allies leave. "Pakistan will find itself in a fix," says analyst Siddiqa. "What Pakistan doesn't want is a U.S. military victory in the short-term without securing its own long-term strategic interests." It is for this reason, many suspect, that Pakistan has not broken with the Afghan Taliban and other Pakistan-based militant groups fighting in Afghanistan.

Mohmand says the best outcome for the U.S. in Afghanistan is to negotiate an exit. "Fundamentally, the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is unsustainable," says the former Pakistan ambassador to Afghanistan. "At some point, they will have to be driven to the negotiations table. Pakistan will have to be included in the overall architecture of those talks. This can happen if basic objectives are met: there is some sort of functioning democracy, there is no space for al-Qaeda and it is a stabilized and peaceful country. If those benchmarks can be negotiated by regional powers, then the U.S. could begin to leave."

• OMAR WARAICH / ISLAMABAD
• The short-term concern is a displacement of militants into Pakistan, but Pakistan fears the strategic consequences of NATO success against the Taliban