On a day when President Barack Obama will be meeting with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan to discuss how best to stabilize an increasingly unstable region of the world, some of the issues that continue to press on Washington policy makers — and cause them to have nightmares — are the issues of the Taliban’s advances in Afghanistan, its growing threat to Pakistan…and the fact that Pakistan has nukes just ripe for the picking.
If you stepped back into a time machine immediately after the 2001 U.S. military operation in Afghanistan, you’d see that these are relatively new issues: many believed the U.S. had definitely defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan, although a difficult clean-up operation was underway; the Taliban was not then a serious threat to Pakistan or its government; and there was always talk about a worse case scenario in Pakistan where extremists could take over the government and get the nukes — but it was about as far fetched then as the idea that terrorists could somehow hijack airplanes and use them as missiles to attack the World Trade Center would have been 10 years ago.
In fact, the worst case scenarios have if not exactly come true become more believable.
For instance, the Christian Science Monitor says this of the Taliban’s advances in Pakistan:
Though the Taliban operate mainly in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal agencies and are battling the military near there, MQM leaders in this southern city are sounding the alarm that Pakistan’s financial capital and main port will be the militants’ next battleground.
They point to internal police memos and journalist reports that the Taliban are finding new sanctuary for their leadership, raising funds through criminal activities, and – with the influx of Pashtun refugees from Pakistan’s war zones – deepening their pool of recruits by tapping into religious seminaries.
Some analysts caution that the MQM is overlaying anti-Taliban rhetoric on a long-running ethnic struggle within the city. Yet the ethnic divides here are cause for concern because they create rallying cries for organized violence, conditions the Taliban could exploit to disrupt this port on the Arabian Sea – and the nation’s trade.
“If the Taliban wanted to destabilize Karachi, ethnic riots would be one of the first things they would do,” says Ahmed Rashid, author of “Descent into Chaos.” “By taking charge of the political leadership of that political movement, they could start taking over large chunks of Karachi.”
To be sure, Pakistan has started a big pushback against the Taliban, and some feel it is beginning to be effective. But the lingering fear remains: the nukes. CBS News frames the issue this way:
And the most recent news from Pakistan underscored the turbulence:
Pakistan said it killed more than 60 militants in heavy bombardments in an upsurge of fighting overnight that caused tens of thousands to flee and threatened to torpedo a northwest peace deal.
The military announced the death tolls, which could not be independently confirmed, ahead of a summit between US President Barack Obama and President Asif Ali Zardari, under US pressure to crush Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters.
Helicopter gunships and artillery swung into action against the Taliban in Swat yesterday, in the deadliest fighting reported in the northwest former ski resort since a February deal sought to end a nearly two-year Taliban insurgency.
“Security forces were being targeted from emerald mines. In retaliatory fire 35 militants were killed,” the military said in a statement.
Another military spokesman said helicopter gunships and artillery bombarded the mines before ground troops recaptured the area from the Taliban. He also said there were reports of civilian casualties in fighting in Swat.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.