- London (IANS) - Pakistan
has continued to back the Taliban and still managed to come out the winner
on the U.S. side, says a leading British commentator.
John Simpson, world affairs editor of the BBC, has written in the Sunday
Telegraph: "We all know nowadays how it (Pakistan) helped to create
the Taliban, launched them across the border, helped them to power and
kept them there," wrote Simpson who has been reporting from Afghanistan.
"And Pakistani government officials maintained close links with the
Taliban even after they escaped from Kabul a fortnight ago."
Simpson writes: "Someone tipped off the Taliban about foreign journalists
who were sneaking across the Afghan border. Someone told them that Abdul
Haq, the Americans' chosen envoy to the Pathans, was coming; they ambushed
and murdered him. Who was responsible? Well, there's no proof but Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence, which originally helped to set up the Taliban,
certainly kept its contacts with them even after they were defeated and
scattered."
And yet Pakistan has been the great beneficiary of this war, he says. "With
consummate skill, President (Pervez) Musharraf and his ministers and officials
have managed to turn the entire, desperate business to their advantage,"
he writes.
"A billion dollars of aid, an end to sanctions, a discreet American
foot on the weighing scales of Pakistan's dispute with India over Kashmir."
Simpson writes: "How brilliantly Pakistan's diplomats played their
hand; how effectively Gen Musharraf himself managed to remind the Americans
at every twist and turn that his position was a dangerous one, and that
unless things were done his way he could not answer for the fundamentalist
consequences."
Simpson adds: "It is the Pakistanis rather than the Indians who have
inherited the subtlety and smooth diplomatic skills of the British Raj.
Some highly trained and intelligent officials have been pressing just the
right flesh and whispering just the right words of assurance and warning
in Washington and London and it has worked superbly."
Pakistan played a double game subtly and successfully, he says. "While
openly supporting the American and British war against the Taliban, Pakistan
was allowing thousands of Pakistani and foreign religious fundamentalists
to slip across the border into Afghanistan to join the jihad. The president
knew perfectly well how it was all going to end and he kept his nerve.
The foreign volunteers were wiped out: especially the Pakistanis, who were
- if such a thing were possible - more loathed by the Afghans than the
Arabs among the Taliban."
Simpson suggests that the angry demonstrations on the streets of Pakistan
early on were stage-managed to demonstrate to America the threat from fundamentalists.
In the West they fell for it, he says.
"They seemed not to notice how the demonstrations were petering out,
the hotheads suddenly falling quiet. Television stations which wanted to
talk about the terrible situation in which Pakistan found itself were forced
to rebroadcast elderly footage of the effigy-burning and slogan-chanting
phase, early in the war.
It seems not to have occurred to them to ask why new pictures were so hard
to come by."
Copyright © 2001 IANS India Private Limited. All rights Reserved.
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