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Issue of border loyality
Newsday
By James Rupert
BORDER CONTROL POST 3, Afghanistan - In the predawn dark Sept. 1, about 200 armed men charged in from Pakistan, firing rockets and rifles at this mountaintop military base. Beating off the attack, "we killed three of them and captured one," said Sakhi Rahman, the Afghan post's commander. "They were all Pakistani."
And who's surprised by that?
And can we send the border post a Marine gunny to advise them on marksmanship?
Pakistani border forces posted nearby did nothing to halt the attack, Rahman told visiting U.S. troops last weekend. Rather, when the invaders fled back across the border, Pakistani troops helped them carry and treat their wounded, he and other soldiers here said.
Nope. No reaction from the surprise meter.
While Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has made his government an essential U.S. ally in its "war on terror," some Pakistani officials and security forces continue to support the Islamic militant Taliban movement, notably in attacks into Afghanistan, U.S. and Afghan military sources said. Pakistani border forces have helped truck Taliban militants to the frontier and even have supported attackers with rifle fire, they said.

Following pressure from President George W. Bush, Musharraf sent extra troops to parts of the Pakistani-Afghan border last month, and senior U.S. military officials have said Pakistan has clamped down on border infiltration, although it has not arrested Taliban leaders there. Pakistan's foreign ministry spokesman, Masood Khan, said the estimated 70,000 troops along the border form "a large chunk of Pakistan's forces and represents a large commitment" by Musharraf's government "to root out terrorists of any persuasion."

From bunkers dug into their rocky mountaintop, Rahman and his Afghan troops look over the Pakistani region of Waziristan. At Musharraf's order, Pakistan's army this year has attacked deep into Waziristan, an autonomous tribal territory, to uproot the largely foreign al-Qaida movement of Osama bin Laden. Pakistan has arrested an estimated 600 al-Qaida activists in the past three years and killed others in battle, including Chechens, Arabs, Uzbeks and local tribesmen who took their side. But the Taliban movement is more local -- born in Pakistan among the Pashtun tribes that dominate the Pakistani and Afghan border regions. It was bred, scholars say, by Pakistan's military intelligence agency as a way to install a pro-Pakistani government in Afghanistan.
But coincidentally, when the Paks began serious operations in South Waziristan the "Taliban" attacks in Afghanistan dropped off dramatically...
Since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan forced the Taliban from power here in 2001, many of the movement's prominent leaders have been living as refugees in Pakistan. Afghans and many specialists on the region say such Taliban exiles have organized and financed attacks on U.S. and Afghan government targets in Afghanistan...
Posted by: Fred 2004-10-31
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=47438