Pakistani Taliban confound Obama, Clinton

WASHINGTON, April 24 (UPI) -- The good news is that Taliban militants have agreed to pull out of the Buner district of Pakistan, which had put them only 60 to 70 miles from the national capital, Islamabad. The bad news is that they remain firmly established in the neighboring Swat Valley, only 100 miles from the capital.

The growing power of the extreme Islamic Taliban in Pakistan continues to confound the Obama administration, just as it did the Bush administration before it.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blasted the Pakistani government of President Asif Ali Zardari on Wednesday for failing to confront the radical Islamic insurgents challenging it. She told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that Zardari was "basically abdicating to the Taliban." But she and President Barack Obama don't seem to know what to do to reverse the disintegration of Pakistan either.

Earlier this week Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., told editors and reporters at USA Today that more than three months into office, the Obama team still had not managed to come up with any coherent strategy for restoring stability to the populous Muslim, nuclear-armed power.

"Pakistan is in a moment of peril," Kerry, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told the gathering. "And I believe there is not in place yet an adequate policy or plan to deal with it."

Kerry later backtracked to say he thought work on putting together the strategy was going ahead and that he and his Senate colleagues were cooperating on it. But there was a lot of truth in his original remarks.

Kerry, the 2004 Democratic nominee for president, had high hopes of being chosen as Obama's secretary of state. And it's no secret on Capitol Hill that he was miffed when he was passed over for Sen. Clinton, D-N.Y., who had served in the Senate for less than a third of the time he has.

It is also clear that developments in Pakistan are confounding the bedrock assumptions of Democratic foreign policy planners and pundits just as they did for the Republicans before them. The Obama team, like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the Bush team, has bet heavily on Zardari, the widower of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. But Zardari, no doubt with the fate of his wife clearly in mind, has bent over backward to avoid angering the Taliban and its well-placed allies in Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency. This has allowed the Pakistani Taliban to consolidate its hold on most of the North-West Frontier province, which covers a quarter of the territory of Pakistan.

The Pakistani army has 120,000 troops deployed across the North-West Frontier province, and at times they have clashed with Taliban and al-Qaida forces, both suffering and inflicting significant casualties. But they have been unable to dent the Taliban's increasing political control of the northwest.

The English-language Pakistani newspaper Dawn reported Friday that officials said the Taliban had agreed to pull its forces out of the Buner district of the North-West Frontier province, where they had been patrolling the streets.

Local officials said Taliban leaders agreed to the pullout Friday after more than 100 government paramilitary troops were sent to Buner to man the police stations around the district, Dawn reported.

But the Taliban forces had already made their point, setting up their own checkpoints on roads and taking control of local mosques.

U.S. strategy in Pakistan remains riddled with confusion and contradictions. Afghanistan and Pakistan are increasingly referred to as a single region, AFPAK, but historically, ethnically and economically they have always been very different. The tribes of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in northwest Pakistan have always had far more in common with the tribes of neighboring Afghanistan than with the far more densely populated, economically advanced and more sophisticated Punjab region in the south of Pakistan.

Sparsely populated Afghanistan has never had any effective centralized government or army in its long history. Pakistan has an official population of 146 million people, but its census organization and serious estimates put it now as high as 170 million. It also has nuclear weapons.

Obama and Clinton have eagerly approved a vigorous increase in the U.S. military commitment in Afghanistan. But the supply of those forces is based in significant part on land convoys going through the Khyber Pass and northwest Pakistan, some of the most inaccessible and mountainous territory in the world. And the Taliban forces that the Pakistani military refuses to confront have been increasingly bold in attacking and wrecking these convoys. A convoy of five tanker trucks carrying fuel for NATO troops in Afghanistan was destroyed this week outside the city of Peshawar.

Critics of U.S. policies in Afghanistan have argued that, far from weakening the Taliban, they are making the Taliban stronger in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. U.S. airstrikes, including those by Predator unmanned aerial vehicles that have been killing a significant number of civilians as well as their designated guerrilla targets, are generating more widespread popularity for the Taliban in Afghanistan and in the neighboring regions of Pakistan.

U.S. policymakers and pundits are fond of the idea that Pakistan should mend its relations with neighboring India and turn its forces on the Taliban and al-Qaida instead. But the leaders of Pakistan's army and intelligence services see President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan and the NATO forces supporting him as allies of India, and they have historically supported their Muslim co-religionists in the Taliban over the last decade and a half. Bhutto's assassination sent a powerful warning to other Pakistani civilian politicians like her husband, President Zardari, about the fate they could expect if they tried to challenge the army and ISI.

These are the grim realities Obama administration policymakers are confronting. They have already discovered there are no easy answers.