The NYT did some investigating into the relationship between the Taliban and Pakistan's security agencies, and finds there is anecdotal evidence to support the notion that those agencies "are encouraging the insurgents, if not sponsoring them."
At Jamiya Islamiya, a religious school here in Quetta, Taliban sympathies are on flagrant display, and residents say students have gone with their teachers’ blessings to die in suicide bombings in Afghanistan.
Three families whose sons had died as suicide bombers in Afghanistan said they were afraid to talk about the deaths because of pressure from Pakistani intelligence agents. Local people say dozens of families have lost sons in Afghanistan as suicide bombers and fighters.
One former Taliban commander said in an interview that he had been jailed by Pakistani intelligence officials because he would not go to Afghanistan to fight. He said that, for Western and local consumption, his arrest had been billed as part of Pakistan’s crackdown on the Taliban in Pakistan. Former Taliban members who have refused to fight in Afghanistan have been arrested -- or even mysteriously killed -- after resisting pressure to re-enlist in the Taliban, Pakistani and Afghan tribal elders said.
“The Pakistanis are actively supporting the Taliban,” declared a Western diplomat in an interview in Kabul. He said he had seen an intelligence report of a recent meeting on the Afghan border between a senior Taliban commander and a retired colonel of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence.
Pakistanis and Afghans interviewed on the frontier, frightened by the long reach of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, spoke only with assurances that they would not be named. Even then, they spoke cautiously.
The Pakistani military and intelligence services have for decades used religious parties as a convenient instrument to keep domestic political opponents at bay and for foreign policy adventures, said Husain Haqqani, a former adviser to several of Pakistan’s prime ministers and the author of a book on the relationship between the Islamists and the Pakistani security forces.
The religious parties recruited for the jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan from the 1980s, when the Pakistani intelligence agencies ran the resistance by the mujahedeen and channeled money to them from the United States and Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Mr. Haqqani said.
In return for help in Kashmir and Afghanistan the intelligence services would rig votes for the religious parties and allow them freedom to operate, he said.
The article made this point:
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, President Pervez Musharraf, under strong American pressure, pledged to help root out Islamic extremism, and, as both head of the army and president, he has more direct control of the intelligence services than past civilian prime ministers. But according to several analysts, Pakistani intelligence officials believe it is more prudent to prepare for the day when Western troops leave Afghanistan.
Pakistan has long seen jihadi movements like the Taliban as a counter to Indian and Russian influence next door in Afghanistan, the Western diplomat and other analysts said, and as a way to provide Pakistan with “strategic depth,” or a friendly buffer on its western border.
While one would hate to doubt one's allies, perhaps Musharraf views the 700 soldiers he claims have been lost battling militants in the frontier territories as a cost of doing business to show the West he's a reliable ally in the war on terror.
At the same time, he covertly maintains his country's long alliance with the Taliban, allowing his security forces to do what they have to do to advance Pakistan's interests in Aghanistan.
There was a report earlier this week of a Taliban spokesman claiming that Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of Afghanistan's Taliban, is living in Quetta -- under ISI sponsorship, no less.
While Pakistan denies it, does it make more sense that Omar is in Afghanistan? To me, it doesn't. And if he's in Pakistan, does it make more or less sense that he could stay free for almost six years without the ISI and other security agencies giving him a free pass?
Questions, questions ...