Pakistan sees India when they see SWAT

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124823898093171403.html
What goes around comes around. A fundamental learning that Pakistan seems to have forgotten as they allege “Indian Links” to militant activities in their country. Reproducing Mathew Rosenburg article in Wall Street Journal: Pakistan sees India when they see WSJ.

Surrounded by aides and fellow officers, a large map propped up behind him, Maj. Gen. Sajjad Ghani lays out the battle plan for Pakistan's Swat Valley. He details how the Pakistani army swept in from the south and north in a "double pincer." He motions his pointer at the towns and villages where the fighting was fiercest and explains how the militants eventually melted away in the face overwhelming firepower.

Most of this is a well-worn narrative of the battle for Swat until Gen. Ghani, the commander of the northern half of the valley, turns to the alleged Indian role in the fighting.The Taliban, he explains, is "being directed, commanded and controlled by some of our hostile intelligence agencies being controlled by our neighboring country."

In case you didn't get it, that's code for India. And he doesn't stop there. He calls the town of Matta, a major Taliban stronghold in Swat, the "Benares of terrorism," using the old name of Hinduism's holiest city, Varanasi.

To outsiders, such comments are easily dismissed as the unscripted remarks of a conspiracy-minded soldier who has spent a lifetime preparing to fight his country's larger and more powerful rival.

But spend enough time in Pakistan, and you'll hear it expressed over and over again by everyone from street-side tea vendors to university students to senior officials. Most who offer up the theory seem to genuinely believe it. They see the Taliban's advance in Pakistan as part of a larger Indian conspiracy to encircle the country by building ties to the U.S. and Afghanistan, never mind that the Taliban is fighting U.S. and Afghan forces.

"Some circles believe that the Indian consuls in Afghanistan, fully supported by the U.S., are creating mayhem and sabotaging peace in Pakistan," wrote the Daily Express, an Urdu-lanaguage newspaper, in a June 30 editorial. "The Pakistani army should come down hard on anyone who is playing in the hands of foreign powers, including Baitullah Mehsud," the nominal leader of the Pakistan Taliban.

Rarely is any evidence proffered or India directly named. The comments usually come off as ham-handed attempts to deflect from Pakistan's own failures, as India itself often is quick to blame a "foreign hand" in atrocities before there has even been time to gather evidence. (Sometimes, of course, the foreign hand is at play – witness Mohammed Ajmal Kasab's confession Monday in Mumbai.)

Ironically, Pakistan's blaming India for its problems in Swat may actually, and unintentionally, have served a useful purpose in the broader anti-Taliban push. The idea that fighting the Taliban is tantamount to fighting India appears to have helped drive a massive turnaround in Pakistani public opinion, giving the government and the army the backing it needs to aggressively fight the militants.

"We've externalized an internal problem," says a senior Pakistani official who's often been critical of the government's ambiguous relationship with Pakistan's myriad Islamist militant groups.
The official doesn't believe predominately Hindu India is backing one of the world's fiercest Islamist movements, calling the suggestion "nonsense." And he says there's no organized effort to paint the Taliban as India's proxy even though many officials and generals "really believe it."
Still, "it's helped at a time when we really need the help," he says.

Some of the shift in public sentiment away from the peace accord with the Taliban signed in February undoubtedly is due to the Taliban's brutal rule of Swat. One widely circulated video showed the militants flogging a teenage girl accused of having an improper relationship with a man.

The Taliban also began to move into neighboring districts, raising alarms among Pakistan's urban middle and upper classes, some of whom sympathize with the Taliban but few of whom want to actually be ruled by the militants.

But anti-India sentiment has clearly played a role in rallying the Pakistani public and, perhaps more important, the deeply nationalistic military to support a broad anti-Taliban offensive. Such sentiment, however, also suggests that Pakistan won't lead a full-scale clampdown on all the country's myriad Islamist militant groups, many of which had long been used by Pakistan as proxies in Afghanistan and India's part of Kashmir. It's not all Islamist militants that are the problem, the thinking goes, just those being used by our enemies.

That helps explain why many Pakistanis opposed the Taliban in Pakistan yet at the same time support, to some degree, the Afghan Taliban, which is seen as distinct. It also explains why the Afghan Taliban and its allies still rely on safe havens on the Pakistani side of the border.
In fact, ask a Pakistani civilian or military official what the biggest problem in the region is, and only the rare few tell you it's the Taliban. Most say it's the presence of U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces next door.