The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2008

because support is provided from our side.” Much speculation has surrounded the question of whether Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence direc- torate has directly orchestrated or passively tolerated such militant activ- ity. But in a real sense this misses the point. As a sover- eign state Pakistan has rights, but it also has responsibil- ities, and one of these duties is to prevent its territory from being used in this way. Closing the border with Afghanistan is not an effective means to this end, but moving vigorously against key Afghan Taliban cells inside Pakistan would be. Few observers with any knowledge of Pakistan doubt Islamabad’s ability to deal with this problem — if pre- sented in a serious and sustained fashion with the right incentives to do so. The key sanctuaries for the Afghan Taliban leaders are in the city of Quetta rather than the remote and inaccessible tribal areas; and the “Red Mosque” crisis in Islamabad in July 2007 demonstrated that the Pakistan military can effectively concentrate its fire on such targets if it chooses to do so. As long as NATO states seem unwilling to take a strong stand in the light of Pres. Musharraf’s admission, a shadow will hover over the seriousness of their commitment to Afghani- stan. The Reality Test NATO’s battle in Afghanistan is not just a struggle against gangs of Taliban fighters. It is a battle for the confidence of the Afghan people. And the blunt reality is that Afghans’ experience of the wider world in recent decades has not been encouraging. After the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in February 1989 interest in the Afghans and their prob- lems dwindled substantially in the West, facilitating the F O C U S J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 39 Here, the problem of “collateral damage” is extremely serious.