May 7th, 2009 by Eoghan

Matt Yglesias discusses the absurdity of the U.S. having to persuade Pakistan’s government to take seriously the Taliban insurgency against Pakistan’s government. He speculates that one reason Pakistan’s effort against domestic militants has been so lackluster may be the ambivalence of the Pakistani military. Military leaders in Pakistan know the insurgency poses less of a threat to their power than it does to the civilian government, and they also know that their support from the U.S. only goes up as the Taliban gain ground.

At TAPPED, Michelle Goldberg says the U.S. is enabling Pakistan’s leaders to ignore the Taliban threat by providing Islamabad with unconditional aid. On the Reuters blog, Sanjeev Miglani suggests that the U.S. might push the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (led by Asif Ali Zardari) and the opposition Pakistan Muslim League (N) party (led by Nawaz Sharif) to form a unity government in order to more effectively confront the militant threat. Although there appears to be some support for such a move in Pakistan’s western provinces, Miglani says, the politics of forming a unified Pakistani government, let alone of the U.S. involving itself in those negotiations, would be complex, to say the least.

While the U.S. is pressing Pakistan to crack down on the Taliban fighters who harbor al-Qaeda and seek to overthrow the Pakistani government, President Obama has also expressed a willingness to explore negotiations with comparatively moderate tribal leaders or other fighters who can be split off from the Taliban, just as the U.S. co-opted many Sunni insurgents in Iraq. But there may be resistance to such a policy by some in Pakistan and especially in Afghanistan. Virginia Moncrieff reports at the Huffington Post that a “retired Pakistani General, Talat Masood, told the Washington Times this week that negotiating with the Taliban is a ‘waste of time’” because the Taliban do not accept the legitimacy of Pakistan’s democratic constitution. Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister, Rangin Dadfar Spanta, has even harsher words about the idea of talking to the Afghan Taliban: “If foreign countries who have come to help us want to hand over Afghanistan to armed enemies, then it’s better they leave our country.”

Posted in Afghanistan, Diplomacy, Foreign Aid, Pakistan, Taliban, US foreign policy, al-Qaeda |