Whither thou goest, they will go

: The killing of 10 French NATO soldiers last week was the most emphatic demonstration yet of the Taliban’s ability to strike within range of the Afghan capital. And [then] the Taliban’s Pakistani offshoot claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in Islamabad, proving that the Pakistani capital is also well within the militants’ sights. It has never been clearer that the fates of Afghanistan and Pakistan are entwined in this battle against a common enemy. There will never be stability in Afghanistan until the Taliban is denied a base in Pakistan. Yet Pakistan is finding it impossible to police its western territories effectively while the Pashtun population of those areas support the “resistance” of their tribal allies across that border against perceived foreign occupation. This is the complex tangle of historical loyalties, national pride and religious fanaticisms that the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan and NATO must somehow unpick if there is ever to be a semblance of peace in the region.

On the face of it, Mr Zardari’s proposal to add the Taliban to the official list of banned organisations in Pakistan looks like a futile gesture. If the Taliban’s brand of religiously inspired violence could be eliminated by legal writ, it would surely have been snuffed out long ago. But there could be more to this than meets the eye. President Pervez Musharraf presented himself to the outside world as a steadfast opponent of the Taliban, yet the former army leader was playing a double game.

[If] Mr Zardari’s sounding of the alarm means that the Government of Pakistan is now going to step up military efforts to put down the Taliban, it could be the first piece of encouraging news from the region in many months. Western room for manoeuvre is extremely constricted. NATO can increase its military support [to] Hamid Karzai, but any serious Western military operation across the border in Pakistan would simply throw Oil onto the flames of the Pashtun insurgency and undermine the authority of Islamabad.

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