08 September 2008
The Edge
In his NYT Magazine article on 6 September 2008, “Right at the Edge,” Dexter Filkins concludes that Pakistan’s military and its intelligence agency, the ISI, have made fighting the Taliban in the country’s Tribal Areas and in Afghanistan a game the objective of which is to obtain financial aid from the United States. As long as the U.S. is a sucker for that charade, the Pakistani security forces will find it necessary to create the danger for which they advance themselves as one of the key solutions.
It’s time to call on Pakistan to take its responsibility for helping to produce order in Central Asia more seriously. That function should be Pakistan’s business, not a dramatic role. Instead of being paid to entertain, Pakistan can earn the equivalent of what the U.S. and NATO are spending on their own security operations in Afghanistan by supplanting them and becoming their prime contractor.
It may take some doing to convince Afghans to accept Pakistan as the deliverer of counterinsurgency and security services, training, even “community organizing.” The Afghan government should be commissioned to perform certain tasks now undertaken by NATO, including contracting for services that Pakistan might compete to supply. It wouldn’t cost the West any more to lay these security functions off to the institutions of the nations involved and to hold them to strict accounting, than to perform those functions themselves at great expense and risk of injury or death.
In his NYT Magazine article on 6 September 2008, “Right at the Edge,” Dexter Filkins concludes that Pakistan’s military and its intelligence agency, the ISI, have made fighting the Taliban in the country’s Tribal Areas and in Afghanistan a game the objective of which is to obtain financial aid from the United States. As long as the U.S. is a sucker for that charade, the Pakistani security forces will find it necessary to create the danger for which they advance themselves as one of the key solutions.
It’s time to call on Pakistan to take its responsibility for helping to produce order in Central Asia more seriously. That function should be Pakistan’s business, not a dramatic role. Instead of being paid to entertain, Pakistan can earn the equivalent of what the U.S. and NATO are spending on their own security operations in Afghanistan by supplanting them and becoming their prime contractor.
It may take some doing to convince Afghans to accept Pakistan as the deliverer of counterinsurgency and security services, training, even “community organizing.” The Afghan government should be commissioned to perform certain tasks now undertaken by NATO, including contracting for services that Pakistan might compete to supply. It wouldn’t cost the West any more to lay these security functions off to the institutions of the nations involved and to hold them to strict accounting, than to perform those functions themselves at great expense and risk of injury or death.
Comments:
Post a Comment
