In my column in Human Events this morning I discuss Pakistan’s longstanding double game:
The Taliban, sponsor of Osama bin Laden, terror-makers for decades, are on the ropes — at least in Pakistan. Pakistan’s foreign minister, Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi, delivered the good news on Sunday: the Taliban is being routed along the Afghanistan border. “The operation so far has been very successful,” he revealed. “The resistance that we were expecting initially did not come with the same swiftness we were expecting.”
AP reported that “Pakistan’s armed forces hope to rout Taliban militants in the rugged mountainous region along the border with Afghanistan before winter sets in by late December.”
In just eight weeks, then, the Taliban in Pakistan — only recently poised to storm Islamabad and topple Pakistan’s government — will be finished. Qureshi said that Pakistan’s armed forces have the Taliban “on the run. They are in retreat and there is disarray over there.”
If this sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. Or, at very least, it’s the same thing we’ve heard from Pakistani officials many times before. They have been declaring victory for years now, and their American counterparts have been nodding gratefully and signing the checks.