Afghanistan's new great game: The undeclared wars within the war: DW

Author: Chris Kline
Editor: Rob Mudge

Conventional Western public opinion regards the war in Afghanistan as a struggle between NATO and extremist Islamic militants. Since assuming office Barack Obama has redefined the conflict by calling it the Af-Pak war.

The US president's redefinition is recognition that the Taliban's nerve center, as well as al Qaeda's safe haven are across Afghanistan's border in neighboring Pakistan. In the forbidding tribal territories, Waziristan especially, another dimension of the same fierce conflict is underway with more Pakistani troops thrown into the fray than the whole of NATO deploys on its side of the Northwest Frontier.

But unlike Afghanistan where NATO allows journalists free access to combat operations, the Pakistani military remains media-averse and highly secretive of its own internal counter-insurgency efforts. On the surface of things, however Pakistan is NATO's and particularly Washington's staunch ally in the regional and global campaign against terror. It's a role for which Islamabad in dire economic straits is rewarded handsomely with a massive combined US economic and military aid package it could not do without.

But as British author Moni Mohsin, a lifelong student of Pakistan points out "Pakistan is also the only US ally, America frequently bombs with drone missile strikes, which sometimes kill terrorists and just as often kill civilians."

And While Islamabad is at pains to denounce the Predator missile attacks and adamantly insists it does not authorize them, Mohsin told Deutsche Welle that there is tacit Pakistani government approval for the strikes. Yet when the attacks are publicized it only helps to feed the ever present anti-American propaganda in Pakistan's right wing media "which in turn becomes a pro-Talibanization as far as the public is concerned."

The prevalence of anti-US sentiment in popular culture is something the Pakistani army and the all powerful military intelligence service or ISI, seem to thrive on and encourage although they are ostensible allies of the West, in presumably the same struggle. The underpinning complexity of such duality is at the essence of what routine western analysis of South Asia often fails to pinpoint.

At the core of this double game, is Pakistan's traditional enmity with India, the dominance of the armed forces and its spymasters in Pakistan's national and political life and a long standing rapport with the Taliban and other radical groups which it has not only supported but also created in some cases.

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