By Richard Foot, Canada.com
There was a blunt, if understated admission this week from Gen. David Richards, the British commander of all NATO forces in Afghanistan: "There is a Taliban problem in Pakistan," he said at a press conference in Kabul. "Without close co-operation with Pakistan, there can be no long-term solution (in Afghanistan)."

NATO has been unwilling, until recently, to publicly admit that success or failure in Afghanistan rests largely in the hands of the Pakistan regime of President Pervez Musharraf.

But Richards's frank assessment begs the question how can Canadian soldiers be expected to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, when one of the keys to winning the war lies not in Afghanistan at all, but across the border, on the sovereign soil of a supposed ally?

"The major source of the instability now in Afghanistan is the sanctuary the Taliban enjoy in Pakistan. It's not only a sanctuary, it's a breeding ground and a training ground," says Peter Tomsen, a former U.S. ambassador who served as White House envoy to the Afghan resistance in the 1990s.

"Your prime minister shouldn't tolerate this any longer," Tomsen said in a recent interview. "He has to move to a much tougher policy of pressuring Pakistan to end its strategic support of the Taliban, which is directly damaging Canada's national interest and killing its soldiers."

Since 2001, Tomsen and other like-minded experts have warned that the project to rebuild Afghanistan and tear down its Islamist terror networks will fail without an equal or greater effort inside Pakistan.

This year, as the Taliban roared back to life after consolidating its power and marshalling its forces, a policy debate has grown in Washington and London about how to deal with Pakistan and solve the rising power and influence of the Taliban both inside the Federally Administered Tribal Areas on Pakistan's northwest frontier, and in Baluchistan province across the border from Kandahar, where Canadians are fighting a daily war.

In London last month, a leaked Ministry of Defence document was unequivocal about Pakistan's role in that war. It said the Pakistan regime was "supporting the Taliban" and that the West has ignored this problem for years by "turning a blind eye" towards Pakistan's promotion of terrorism.

There are similar concerns in Ottawa, where in spite of the government's relative silence on the matter neither the defence minister, the chief of defence staff, nor a single member of the Foreign Affairs Department agreed to be interviewed about Pakistan alarms are being raised.

"I'm deeply concerned about it," says Hugh Segal, chairman of the Senate's foreign affairs committee, who says he pressed the issue of Taliban sanctuaries on Tuesday with a visiting delegation of high-ranking Pakistan senators.

"My sense is that there is, in External Affairs, there's a little bit of tiptoeing through the tulips on this issue," Segal said.

The reasons are obvious. Pakistan is a fractious country of 160 million people, deeply torn by ethnic divisions and internal insurgencies, all held together by a military dictator controlling a nuclear arsenal in the heart of one of the world's most dangerous regions.

Western governments would rather try to do business with Musharraf, says Segal, than push him too hard and risk destabilizing his regime, potentially winding up with Islamic extremists at the helm of an unstable nuclear power.

But Tomsen and others say since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Musharraf has been a duplicitous ally, feigning commitment in the war on terror while at the same time tolerating and even protecting the Taliban.

"Pakistan is playing a double game," says Christine Fair, a Pakistan specialist at the Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention at the U.S. Institute for Peace, a non-partisan think-tank in Washington.

"They're trying to keep elements of the Taliban alive so they can run these people back into power in Afghanistan when Canada and the U.S. and NATO all leave.

"People who say Musharraf is not playing a double game are people who just don't want to know the truth. Our governments are so afraid of Pakistan going down the tubes, they'll tolerate anything from them. Your government, mine, and the British have no stomach to stand up to Pakistan."

But there's no dispute that the Musharraf regime, while helpful in arresting and handing over important al-Qaida commanders, hasn't arrested a single Taliban leader of any consequence, even though the core Taliban command, including its top figure Mullah Omar, allegedly live relatively open lives in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, plotting and leading the insurgency in southern Afghanistan.

"The Pakistani government has very cleverly kept the United States happy by turning over an al-Qaida operative every once in a while, but it has always protected the Taliban," says Sarah Chayes, a former U.S. journalist who covered the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and has lived in Kandahar ever since.

"They're not forthcoming with the Taliban leadership," she said in a recent U.S. radio interview. "And yet the leadership isn't sitting around in caves or in secret places. It's sitting around in Quetta, the capital of a province."

Adds Tomsen: "The national objectives of NATO countries involved in Afghanistan do not coincide with Pakistan's objectives. They clash head on.

"Pakistan does not want a rebuilt, democratic Afghanistan. It would like to see another friendly, Islamist-oriented puppet regime in Kabul."

Pakistan's government has protested such claims. Musharraf told the CBC last month that his army has suffered 500 casualties "fighting terrorism" and Islamic extremists in western Pakistan.

Martin Smith, a U.S. documentary filmmaker who recently visited the area for PBS Television, says there exists on the frontier a smaller version of the failed state that once resided in Afghanistan: a sprawling infrastructure of Taliban command centres, training camps and madrassas, all fuelled by opium sales and by money from the Arabian peninsula funnelled into Pakistan through Karachi.

How much power does Musharraf have to shut down this infrastructure if he chose to?

"I think his regime could do a lot more," said Smith in an interview, "but only Musharraf knows how much domestic shit he would get if he clamped down on the Taliban. The problem is, until those sanctuaries are addressed, the whole project in Afghanistan is at risk."

Why did Pakistan help create the Taliban in the 1990s, and why, as some allege, does it continue to support the Taliban today?

"Pakistan is an insecure state," says Christine Fair, a South Asia scholar at the United States Institute of Peace, a think-tank in Washington D.C. "Pakistan does not have a recognized border with Afghanistan, and they have a disputed border with India. So Pakistan's nightmare has always been having to fight a two-front war."

Since independence from Britain in 1947, Pakistan has lived in fear of both borders. To the east it has fought three wars with its arch-enemy India, and still wages a low-level military campaign in the border region of Kashmir.

Meanwhile, its western border, a colonial-era construct called the Durand line, is not recognized by Afghanistan because many of the Pashtun lands that now lie inside Pakistan are regarded by Pashtun politicians as either Afghan or sovereign Pashtun territory.

For decades, Pakistan has sought to solve these dual pressures on its frontiers by seeking a friendly, and even a proxy government in Kabul such as the Taliban with a pan-Islamic rather than a nationalist Afghan agenda.

Having Islamic friends in power in Kabul means Pakistan no longer has to worry about Afghan claims on its western territories. A proxy government in Afghanistan also provides Pakistan with a buffer state to the west, with millions of additional Muslims, to help counter the weight of Hindu India in the east.

"Pakistanis have always favoured Islamic governments in Kabul rather than ethnic or secular ones," says Louis Delvoie, who served as Canadian high commissioner to Pakistan in 1991-94.

"They fear that a secular government would want to change the border. Pakistan also regards Afghanistan as giving it strategic depth in its conflict with India. Pakistan is a narrow country alongside India. If worst came to worst, Pakistan could make use of Afghan territory to give itself some depth."

Fair says the U.S. and Britain could use this dynamic to both entice and pressure Pakistan to crack down on Taliban leaders and sanctuaries.

The U.S. could make a bargain with Pakistan, formally guaranteeing its geographic integrity and its security against hostile neighbours, in return for political favours against the Taliban. That would require Washington to also pressure India into easing its demands on Kashmir.

NATO could wield a big stick, threatening Pakistan that unless it takes action against the Taliban, Indian soldiers will be invited into Afghanistan to help with security efforts there. Indian influence in Afghanistan, particularly any military presence, is one of Pakistan's greatest worries.

Whatever strategic sticks or carrots are used, the U.S., Canada and the rest of NATO must also convince Pakistan, says Fair, that western forces are determined to stay in Afghanistan for years to come, and are serious about preventing the Taliban from returning to power.

The deployment of tens of thousands more NATO troops in Afghanistan, might convince the Pakistan military to abandon its dreams of bringing the Taliban back to Kabul.

"We need many, many more troops there," says Fair, "a vastly increased presence, to show Pakistan we're in for the long haul."

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