A Deadly Triangle by Dalrymple William.;

Author:Dalrymple, William.;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

9/11 Changed Everything

In Pakistan General Pervez Musharraf, the army commander who had overthrown and replaced Nawaz in the military coup of 1999, was quickly pressured by American threats into allying himself unambiguously with the U.S. “We were on the verge of being declared a terrorist state,” he later wrote in his memoirs. “In that situation,” he added—revealing his overarching strategic priority—”what would have happened to the Kashmir cause?”

Musharraf's support for the U.S. reversed a decade of Pakistani foreign policy. He embraced President George W. Bush's “Global War on Terror,” publicly broke relations with the Taliban, and called for the arrest of members of al-Qaida. By 2007, according to his own estimate, 672 of them had been rounded up in Pakistan, 369 of whom were then handed over to the U.S. This saved Pakistan from being bombed “back to the stone age” by America—a threat Musharraf attributes to Richard Armitage, Bush's deputy secretary of state (Armitage denies using those words).

…only months after 9/11, the ISI was providing refuge to the entire Taliban leadership…

The reversal of policy came at a great price to Pakistani influence in Afghanistan. And it happened when India's influence was at an all-time high, thanks largely to Hamid Karzai's ascension to power shortly after 9/11.

In the years afterward, India made wise use of its opportunity to forge a close partnership with Afghanistan. The aid and reconstruction program it set in motion during the 1980s was so generous that it quickly established India as the single largest donor in the country. It was also carefully thought out, praised as one of the best planned and targeted aid efforts by any country.

India has built roads linking Afghanistan with Iran so that Afghanistan's trade can reach the Persian Gulf at the port of Chabahar, thus freeing it of the need to rely on the Pakistani port of Karachi. India has donated or helped to build electrical power plants, health facilities for children and amputees, 400 buses and 200 minibuses, and a fleet of aircraft for Ariana Afghan Airlines. India has also been involved in constructing power lines, digging wells, running sanitation projects and using solar energy to light up villages, while Indian telecommunications personnel have built digitized telecommunications networks in 11 provinces. One thousand Afghan students a year have been offered scholarships to Indian universities. India has also played a key role in the construction of a new Afghan parliament in Kabul at a cost of $25 million.

All this led to India becoming enormously popular in Afghanistan: an ABC/BBC poll in 2009 showed 74% of Afghans viewing India favorably, while only 8% had a positive view of Pakistan.

Although pressure from the U.S. dissuaded India from sending troops into Afghanistan or providing military supplies, Pakistanis are still deeply disturbed by signs of India's growing influence in the region, especially because many have come to believe India is using its Afghan consulates to foment insurgency in Baluchistan. A former Indian consul general in Kandahar privately admitted to me that he had met with

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