Daily Times Editorial Nov 22, 2009

Mullah Omar’s whereabouts

The US, we know, is taking an extraordinary interest in Pakistan these days. It should not surprise us then that the American media too is obsessed with events in and around Pakistan. US President Obama’s long awaited policy review is on the verge of being announced. Meanwhile apprehensions are being voiced in Pakistan that a troops surge in Afghanistan could have a fallout here. Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani has reiterated to visiting CIA chief Leon Panetta that the US must share its roadmap on Afghanistan with Pakistan. Mr Panetta interacted with the top leadership, including President Asif Zardari, COAS General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani and the ISI chief, Ahmed Shuja Pasha. Each had their take to pass on to Mr Panetta.
While the CIA chief stressed the need to expand military operations beyond Swat/Malakand and South Waziristan to cut off militants crossing the border to attack American and NATO troops in Afghanistan, our ISI chief is said to have complained that the US was not taking due notice of India’s role in Afghanistan or considering Pakistan’s constraint in not being able to shift troops from the eastern border to expand operations in the tribal areas. This disjuncture is hardly new, but there do not appear to be any signs that the two sides are closer to agreement on these issues.
To set the cat among the pigeons, the Washington Times has reported that Mullah Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, has been shifted with ISI help from Quetta to Karachi last month for fear of American drone attacks targeting him in Balochistan’s capital. The source for this startling revelation is two unnamed senior US intelligence officials and a former senior CIA officer. Such reports only widen the perceptual gulf between Pakistan and the US, much to the delight one is sure, of the tribe of varying shades of militants. The report has been denied by President Zardari and the foreign office, but this is just one more example of the conflicted relationship between the US and Pakistan on the issue of combating militancy and terrorism. Washington’s suspicions of the ISI harbouring Mullah Omar and his shura are rooted in the past policy of our military establishment of supporting the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan while tilting against al Qaeda. All the protestations of Pakistan that this is no longer the case have failed to cut any ice with the Americans. It is conceivable that the Afghan Taliban leadership, including Mullah Omar, have found safe havens on Pakistani soil since 2001. But whether the ISI is complicit in this development remains an issue of discord between the two allies in the war on terror. Pakistan continues to deny any such complicity and has repeatedly asked for intelligence regarding Mullah Omar’s whereabouts, without much purchase so far.
The relationship post-9/11 between the US and Pakistan is still dogged by mutual suspicion dating back to Musharraf’s policy of, as the prime minister put it the other day, “running with the hare and hunting with the hounds”, i.e. a duality that took on al Qaeda while protecting and supporting the Afghan Taliban. Until this divide is bridged, the mutually wary minuet between Washington and Islamabad may end up helping the very militants both sides say they want to see eliminated.