ROBERT SPENCER: PAKISTAN AND THE TALIBAN

Posted By on November 5th, 2009

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?print=yes&id=34245
The Taliban, sponsor of Osama bin Laden, terror-makers for decades, are on the ropes — at least in Pakistan. Pakistan’s foreign minister, Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi, delivered the good news on Sunday: the Taliban is being routed along the Afghanistan border. “The operation so far has been very successful,” he revealed. “The resistance that we were expecting initially did not come with the same swiftness we were expecting.”

AP reported that “Pakistan’s armed forces hope to rout Taliban militants in the rugged mountainous region along the border with Afghanistan before winter sets in by late December.”

In just eight weeks, then, the Taliban in Pakistan — only recently poised to storm Islamabad and topple Pakistan’s government — will be finished. Qureshi said that Pakistan’s armed forces have the Taliban “on the run. They are in retreat and there is disarray over there.”

If this sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. Or, at very least, it’s the same thing we’ve heard from Pakistani officials many times before. They have been declaring victory for years now, and their American counterparts have been nodding gratefully and signing the checks.

Last May, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani said that the Pakistani military was just about to wrap up its offensive against the Taliban: “The operation against the terrorists is progressing very successfully and those who destroyed the peace of the nation are fleeing in disguise,” he said confidently. Only mop-up operations remained: “Troops will remain in the region until peace is ensured and all the displaced people return home.”

Six months later, they’re within eight weeks of victory.

These boasts came after a string of promises. In late February 2009, Qureshi declared that “Pakistan is willing to work with the American administration to fight extremism and terrorism. We are determined to defeat terrorism in all its forms and manifestations.” This came five months after Pakistan’s current president, Asif Ali Zardari, declared: “I will work to defeat the domestic Taliban insurgency and to ensure that Pakistani territory is not used to launch terrorist attacks on our neighbors or on NATO forces in Afghanistan.”

That recalled what his predecessor, General Pervez Musharraf, said in August 2007: “I firmly believe that terrorist elements and foreign militants must be dealt with a strong hand.” He said this five months after his late rival, Benazir Bhutto, warned presciently: “The Taliban have actually established a mini-state in the tribal areas of Pakistan. My fear is that if these forces are not stopped in 2007, they are going to try to take on the state of Pakistan itself.”

This came after Musharraf in November 2006 hotly denied that Pakistan was not doing everything it could to stop the Taliban and other terrorist elements. “We have suffered casualties. We have suffered about 600 dead. Now if you think that we are suffering dead by not doing any thing, or not doing enough, then we are not seeing reality.” This came fourteen months after Musharraf offered to erect a fence between Pakistan and Afghanistan in order to put an end to charges that Pakistani officials were aiding the Taliban rather than fighting against it.

And so it goes. In August 2005, Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz thundered against terrorism: “We will fight a war against this danger to protect our independence and we will defeat it at every level.” In August 2004, Musharraf vowed that he would not let jihadists from Pakistan cross into Afghanistan and attempt to disrupt the elections there – a vow that Western officials met with extreme skepticism, given the sympathy for the jihad that was manifest even then at high levels in Pakistan.

Asked if the Taliban’s days were numbered, Musharraf said, “It appears so” — on October 1, 2001. And now eight years later, they’re numbered again. How many more American billions is the State Department going to spend on these promises that have turned out to be empty again and again?

Supporters of aid to Pakistan say that we need them on our side in the war on terror. And certainly it is true that, for all of Pakistan’s broken promises, we cannot afford to let it and its nuclear arsenal fall into the hands of the Taliban or their ilk.

Yet we have every right to press the Pakistanis hard to repair their long string of broken promises, and wasted money.

It’s time to look long and hard at what the Pakistanis do, not what they say. And they must do the same.

Mr. Spencer is director of Jihad Watch and author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)”, “The Truth About Muhammad,” “Stealth Jihad,” and most recently “The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran” (all from Regnery — a HUMAN EVENTS sister company).

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