America's New War with Pakistan

America's New War with Pakistan

from The Washington Note by Steve Clemons

At the 2011 Washington Ideas Forum, former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf tells Atlantic Media Chairman David Bradley that he was 500 percent sure that at least he did not know about bin Laden residing inside Pakistan.  If true, that's very bad news.

This means that Pakistan, which has been behaving like a badly wounded, now unpredictable, tiger since the US killing of Osama bin Laden, may have more highly developed, compartmentalized command and control national security operations completely siloed from each other.  This has long been thought about the ISI, but that agency may be just the beginning of a very fragmented set of operations -- cocooned from each other -- that neither the President nor the Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Kayani, have full command of.

The information that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff Commander Mike Mullen have revealed on Pakistan's direct hand in the inner-Kabul terror attacks that are taking place with greater frequency, including an attack on the US Embassy compound in Kabul but starting in part with the bombing of the British Council offices which I blogged about that morning, means that the US government is clearly now in conflict with at least part, if not all, of Pakistan's national security forces. 

This report, "The Failing US Strategy in Afghanistan," by Tufail Ahmad and Y. Carmon and published by the Middle East Media Research Institute, deserves a careful read.