We are now at a crossroads with Pakistan, a point at which we need to pull out old words from the Bush playbook. It is time to state to them—to state, in particular, to Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani, the Pakistan Army’s chief of staff—that Pakistan is either with us, or against us. There can be no caveats, no exit clauses, no fine print, no weasely handwringing about Pakistan’s need to retain “strategic balance” in Afghanistan.
Much of the latest involvement in the Afghan insurgency by the ISI—Pakistan’s military intelligence—happened on Gen. Kayani’s watch, when he was the head of the ISI. That very same man, Kayani, whose agency lovingly breastfed the Taliban, and who was later elevated to Chief of Army Staff, has just been granted a three-year extension by Pakistan’s civilian government. It boggles the mind that this duplicitous underminer of the U.S. war effort is now General David Petraeus’s direct interlocutor. Petraeus will need to navigate a labyrinth of misinformation and half-truths, accompanied by typically unctuous protestations that Pakistan is doing everything it can to help us in the war against al Qaeda. (Readers will not have missed Hillary Cinton’s tart remarks, last week, in which she said on television that “someone” in the Pakistan government must, surely, know where Osama bin Laden is.
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