Pakistan's choices

Fareed Zakaria:

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When one speaks of the Pakistani government, it's necessary to be precise. The elected, civilian government appears to be something of an innocent bystander in this affair. Initially, President Asif Ali Zardari denounced the terrorists and offered full assistance to Indian investigators. His prime minister offered to send the head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency to New Delhi to help. Then, after the Army weighed in, the offer was withdrawn. Zardari's statements became more evasive and defensive. If anyone wondered who actually ran the country, it soon became clear.

Whether the Pakistani military was involved in the Mumbai attacks remains unclear. The Indians certainly think so. "The attackers were trained in four places in Pakistan by men with titles like colonel and major. They used communication channels that are known ISI channels. All this can't happen without the knowledge of the military," one Indian official told me. They're not alone in their suspicions. "This was a three-stage amphibious operation. [The attackers] maintained radio silence, launched diversionary attacks to pull the first responders out of the way, knew their way around the hotels, were equipped with cryptographic communications, credit cards, false IDs," says David Kilcullen, a counter-insurgency expert who has advised Gen. David Petraeus. "It looks more like a classical special forces or commando operation than a terrorist one. No group linked to Al Qaeda and certainly not Lashkar has ever mounted a maritime attack of this complexity." Which would be worse: if the Pakistani military knew about this operation in advance, or if they didn't?

The situation in South Asia is very complicated. But one thing is clear. All roads lead through Rawalpindi, the headquarters of the Pakistani military. For decades it has sponsored militant groups like Lashkar and the Taliban as a low-cost strategy to bleed India and influence Afghanistan. It now faces a choice. Unless Pakistan changes how it conceives of its interests and strategy, the country will remain an unstable place, distrusted by all its neighbors. Even the Chinese, longtime allies, have begun worrying about the spread of Islamic extremism. Pakistan needs to take a civilian, not a military, view of its national interest, one in which good relations with India lead to trade, economic growth and stability. Of course, in such a world Pakistan wouldn't need a military that swallows up a quarter of the government's budget and rules the country like a privileged elite.

The one country that could do more than any other to change the military's mind-set is America. For India to bomb some Lashkar training camps would be to attack the symptoms, not the source of the rot—and would only fuel sympathy for the militants among ordinary Pakistanis. To the contrary, what the world needs is for Pakistan to decide on its own that its prospects are diminished by tolerance of such groups. American diplomacy has been fast and effective so far. But we must keep the pressure on Islamabad, and get countries like China and Saudi Arabia involved as well....

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The problem the civilian have is that they have a tenuous hold on government and are dealing with a military that has often taken over when things are not going their way. What we must do is get the military on board in challenging their spawn. We also have to get them to put more troops in the area where the terrorist are located and in the protection of our supply lines. If they cannot protect those supply lines then we will have to make it clear that we will.

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