Thanks for nothing: Pakistanis in Multan torch an American flag to protest US drone killings of Qaeda and Taliban terrorists in tribal areas. (AFP/Getty Images)
“Pakistani Intelligence Announces Its Full Cooperation with US Forces During Upcoming Top Secret June 12 Drone Strike on al-Qaeda At 5:23 A.M. Near Small Town of Razmani in North Waziristan,” read a recent headline in the online satirical magazine, The Onion.
Alas, the truth is even worse than the fiction.
Twice in the last few weeks, US intelligence officials have provided the Pakistanis with the coordinates of bomb factories in the rugged tribal region of Waziristan, on the Afghan border — only to see the info leak to the enemy, who evacuated the sites before the Pakistani military arrived.
Pakistan is playing a double game — taking billions in US aid but only giving lip service to intelligence and military cooperation in the War on Terror, while it repeatedly sells us out to Islamists and Taliban rebels backed by its own corrupt Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
Pakistan’s record of duplicity starts with the father of the Islamic bomb, A.Q. Khan, who passed on nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea, Libya and elsewhere. When those violations of his nation’s laws and treaties came to light, Pakistan . . . pardoned Khan and put him under house arrest. When the country returned to civilian rule two years ago, President Asif Ali Zardari’s government freed the master proliferator.
Faisal Shahzad, the failed Times Square bomber, was from Pakistan. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Pakistan last year of “severe consequences” should a similar attack be successful. “We cannot tolerate having people encouraged, directed, trained and sent from Pakistan to attack us,” she said.
Then there was Osama bin Laden himself, killed by Navy SEALs in his villa in Abbottabad — Pakistan’s West Point, just 40 miles from Islamabad, the capital. That confirmed longtime suspicions that the ISI and other elements in the Pakistani government were harboring him. Materials recovered at the compound in May, although still being analyzed, are a lock to show further Pakistani-al Qaeda collaboration.
Al Qaeda may be largely defeated in Iraq, but it remains alive and dangerous in the Af-Pak theater — with the Pakistanis as its chief enablers. Just ask Pakistani investigative journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad of the Asia Times Online, a respected authority on al Qaeda.
Oh wait, we can’t. Two days after he published an article that claimed al Qaeda forces had attacked a Pakistani naval base in Karachi in retaliation for the arrest of some officers suspected of ties with bin Laden’s gang, he was kidnapped and killed — the fifth Pakistani journalist murdered in the first half of this year.
Pakistan has been a rogue state practically from its creation by the British in 1947. Since independence, it has waged nonstop war against India, including the five-week Indo-Pakistan War of 1965, continuing conflicts over the disputed province of Kashmir and countless covert operations. Pakistan was also behind the Mumbai massacre in 2008, in which terrorists killed 164 people.
The country is “an international jihadi tourist resort,” writes journalist and author Mohammad Hanif. It functions as a kind of mob informant, profiting from the rackets while occasionally giving up a small fish or two to the cops in exchange for police protection. Yet America treats it as an ally.
Incoming Defense Secretary Leon Panetta arrived in Pakistan Friday to discuss “rebuilding” the Pakistan-US relationship, and reportedly confronted his hosts with the evidence that they’d tipped off the Taliban about the bomb sites.
That’s a good first step. But the world won’t be safe until Pakistan understands that there will be severe consequences for its bad behavior, starting with the loss of aid and continuing with American military action within its borders, if necessary — something then-candidate Barack Obama explicitly threatened back in 2007.
It’s high time for the double game to end — the easy way or the hard way.