The roots of Pakistan's current crisis with the Taliban go back to the early 1980s. CIA and Pakistan money, training and weapon support to the Afghan mujaheddin during their war against the Soviets enabled militant fundamentalists to build a base in Afghanistan, a country whose majority had belonged to a liberal Sunni sect. Pakistan then continued to support the Taliban in their takeover of Afghanistan from the mujaheddin and warlords in the 1990s as U.S. involvement waned. Pakistan's role in supporting the mujaheddin and Taliban has contributed to the war in Afghanistan burgeoning into a regional conflict. It assured that Taliban and Al-Qaeda driven from Afghanistan during the current U.S.-NATO war -- could escape into Pakistani border areas, towns and cities.
Pakistan is a highly militarized country with nuclear weapons, extreme inequality and poverty, a tense relationship with their nuclear rival/neighbor India, and an unstable government a very risky situation in which the United States is expanding the war into Pakistan through counterterrorism. Three and a half million people were rapidly displaced by violence in the SwatValley of Pakistan shortly after the Pakistan military began a US-supported offensive against the Taliban in that region. Dr. Aasim Sajjad Akhtar predicts that the Taliban will grow with recruits from the local Pakistani population as the military offensive continues: "the longer the war continues--and it has only just begun in this region--the better the chances that the Taliban will recruit from the refugees." (7)
What is the impact of U.S. drone attacks to date?
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