India can help break 'triangle of madness'
Today Pakistan is probably the most dangerous nation in the world, but it is India, not Afghanistan and al-Qaeda, that now bears much of the responsibility for this and, arguably, is the country that holds the key to the beginnings of a solution.
More the pity that US President Barack Obama seemed to have backed straight down when India protested at the mandate he wanted his sharpshooting diplomat, Richard Holbrooke, to have - including India as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan. So Mr Holbrooke is reduced to dealing with only two sides of this triangle of madness.
It is an oversimplification to point the finger at India first. It ignores history, not least the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which left behind a raging civil war, enabling the rise of the dogmatic Taleban, which in turn gave a home to Osama bin Laden.
In 1986, I visited Peshawar, in northeast Pakistan, close to the Khyber Pass. The town even then was full of armed encampments in its outer suburbs - Pashtun chiefs who escaped with their people from the Afghan war had built huge, well-defended compounds for refugees from their kin group. It was clear then that the hospitality Pakistan felt it had to extend to the displaced Pashtuns was storing up trouble ahead. Two million such refugees bred violence and extremism.
The Americans and the Saudis were engaged at that time in bolstering these Pashtuns with money and weapons to fight the Red Army. All of it was funded through Pakistan's notorious secret service.
But, once the Soviets were defeated, the US, Saudi Arabia, Britain, France and Israel, who had worked together on this venture, just walked away. The US, which had known about Pakistan's nuclear bomb development for the past decade but kept quiet, suddenly imposed sanctions on Islamabad, saying that it had been developing nuclear weapons in secret.
Pakistan was triply furious - at the sanctions, at Washington's hypocrisy and the fact it was left to cope with the aftermath of the war, not least the radicalising and rise of the Taleban among Afghan Pashtuns. Ambiguously, it supported them, not least because it wanted friends on that border while it concentrated on defending its border with India. So, year by year, Pakistan got drawn into the netherworld of this mad triangle, convinced that India was trying to use Afghanistan as a way of encircling Pakistan.
But the western effort, not succeeding in its main goals of defeating the Taleban and finding bin Laden, has backfired, not just in Afghanistan but increasingly in Pakistan's border areas. It has turned into raving radicals hundreds of thousands of people who, in free elections, didn't vote for the fundamentalist parties.
The Bush administration failed to use its new prestige with India to help complete the talks. Mr Holbrooke needs to get busy with the power centres of India (army, foreign ministry, intelligence services, academics and the press), while pro-peace Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is still in power.
Jonathan Power is a London-based journalist
