Unfailing friend or failing state?

Years from now, historians will look back at 2007 as the year we lost Pakistan. Evidence of Pakistan’s looming disintegration is everywhere.

The year 2007 started with President Pervez Musharraf’s failed peace deal with tribal elders. Then came his war against the Courts and the revolt of the lawyers, followed by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s return to Pakistan and immediate deportation (and subsequent return).

Last fall, Mr. Musharraf declared a state of emergency. Then came the attacks on former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto upon her triumphant return to Pakistan, and finally the one that killed her in Rawalpindi.

There is new fighting in the Swat valley, where Islamic extremists have gained a foothold, and now news that the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Pakistan’s leading military intelligence agency has lost control of its networks to al Qaeda sympathizers. We always suspected that ISI’s networks had Taliban leanings, but this is the clearest evidence that Pakistan’s extremists may be cannibalizing the country’s security forces.

Why should Americans care? Two main reasons.

1) Who, now, is watching the terrorist training camps in Western Pakistan? This region is not only home to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda’s top leadership, it is where all of the major plots against European and Western targets were hatched, and it is public knowledge that more and more Westerners are being trained there.

Britain is on high alert: thousands of Pakistani-Britons spend a month a year in Pakistan. No doubt some trainees and their handlers are hatching plots against America too. Without question, these camps are a potent threat to American security.

2) Who, now, is watching Pakistan’s nuclear program? Everyone focuses, rightly, on locking down weapons and facilities. But it is the know-how the centrifuge technology, the bomb design that is unguarded. Al Qaeda does not need the keys to a facility if it has or can acquire a blueprint and can obtain fissile material on the black market.

Just five years ago, the Bush administration trumpeted the arrest of A.Q. Khan, the architect of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program and the wrapping up of his international proliferation network. But Mr. Musharraf never imprisoned Khan and never permitted us to question him. Is it credible that, as he remains under house arrest, he is refraining from restarting his old network? How did we lose Pakistan? Consider these four points.

1) We began a war of choice in Iraq. Major miscalculations in the post-war phase required us to take our eye off al Qaeda.

2) We gave Mr. Musharraf a blank check. American taxpayers are sending him some $150 million a month with next to no strings attached. He has taken this aid for granted and used it in ways that are not helpful in the fight against al Qaeda such as buying fighter jets to tweak and intimidate India.

3) We allowed Mr. Musharraf to call the shots in the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA) along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. American officials episodically pressed Mr. Musharraf to take action in the FATA, such as when Vice President Dick Cheney and a senior CIA official visited Islamabad in early 2007. But when Mr. Musharraf said no, we had no recourse.

4) America has not done enough to support moderate Islamic forces in Pakistan or elsewhere. The radicalization of Pakistan’s youth mirrors a trend across the Islamic world. America has done precious little to arrest this trend.

Perhaps there was a rationale for supporting Mr. Musharraf immediately after September 11. He offered to join the fight against radical jihadists and made early efforts to police the FATA. But then, to preserve his power, he backed off.

Events at the end of 2007 have sorely tested the Musharraf first policy.

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