The episode illustrates the complex relationship Pakistan’s army has long had with the Afghan Taliban. The army has seen the Taliban as a useful surrogate for controlling Afghanistan since Omar created the movement. The Pashtuns who make up the Taliban dominate the region along the 1,500 mile border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pakistan was one of only three countries that recognized the Omar’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan before 9/11. In those days Pakistan provided the Taliban with weapons, cheap fuel and hundreds of advisors to assist it in fighting the civil war with the Northern Alliance…

There is little evidence to suggest Mullah Omar, who calls himself the Commander of the Faithful, has ever been interested in negotiations with Karzai. The one-eyed leader of the Quetta Shura never talks to the press, never meets with non-Muslims and is remarkably secretive. Osama bin Laden still regularly pledges his loyalty publicly to Omar. If Omar’s No. 2 was straying off the reservation last winter, Omar himself may have asked the ISI to rein him in. Omar seems convinced that time is on the side of the insurgency and that NATO will sooner rather than later give up the battle in Afghanistan. Karzai will then meet the same fate as the communists who Omar helped defeat in the 1980s, a noose. As long as the Pakistani army shares that conviction about NATO’s staying power, it will also maintain its ties to the Taliban.