So, first the Afghan security services broke up what they said was a plot by three armed Pakistanis to assassinate Zalmay Khalilzad, who had been the US ambassador to Afghanistan and is now in Baghdad as the new envoy to Iraq.
Pakistani government officials were absolutely furious that the Afghans had implicated their nationals. Anwar Iqbal says that they demanded that Afghanistan produce proof "or stop making false claims."
So now the Afghans are angry, and they charge that Pakistan has been supporting insurgents in the southern Pushtun areas. The spokesman for President Karzai, Javed Ludin, said that Pakistan was not doing enought to stop the infiltration into Afghanistan of militants like the one who carried out a suicide bombing in a mosque at Qandahar recently.
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Nerves in Islamabad will have been frayed by CIA director Porter Goss's recent comments saying that he had a good idea of where Bin Laden was, but was impeded in getting him by diplomatic considerations. These remarks were widely interpreted as suggesting that he a) thought Bin Laden was somewhere in Pakistan and b) Gen. Musharraf's hold on power was too weak to allow the US to push hard for nabbing the al-Qaeda leader.
Everyone is afraid of pushing Pakistan too hard on the Bin Laden issue, lest radical Muslim junior officers or military intelligence types be provoked to make a coup, giving the world a radical Islamist state with an atomic bomb.
But the fact is that no one knows exactly where Bin Laden and Zawahiri are, or they would have been apprehended. They are rumored to be in the rugged Waziristan tribal area. But other high al-Qaeda officials have been captured in urban mansions, so that I'm not so sure. Bin Laden's videotape released before the US election demonstrates that he had seen Fahrenheit 9/11, which would be hard to do in a cave. Moreover, Bin Laden did have bases in Afghanistan for 20 years, and that he is in Paktika or someplace can't be ruled out.
Iraq has become history's most prolific producer of master terrorists, Rice has swept through the Middle East criticizing our allies and encouraging the Muslim Brotherhood, US Special Forces continue their undermining of Iran, the US occupies eastern Syria, Israel has produced another generation of terrorists in the Territories and southern Lebanon, and now Afghanistan continues to destabilize under the neglect of Washington and pressure from our "ally" Pakistan. Cole points out the vulnerability of Musharraf, the man who must span the political sensibilities of Jihadists and US conservatives.
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