There is a new cold war in South East Asia -- between the US and Pakistan, writes Graham Usher in Peshawar Relations between Pakistan and the United States are at their coldest since Islamabad became a reluctant convert to the "war on terror" in September 2001. The chill is felt in official and unofficial American complaints that Pakistan's peacemaking with pro-Taliban tribesmen on its Afghan borderlands is the cause of a spike in Taliban attacks against NATO forces in Afghanistan. Sometimes the criticism is more tangible. On 11 July six Pakistan soldiers were wounded by mortar fire from the other side of the Afghan-Pakistan border, "whether by foreign [NATO] or Afghan forces is yet to be determined," said an angry army spokesman. The rage is understandable. The hit came a month after 11 Pakistani soldiers were killed by US missiles at their frontier post, the worst case of "friendly fire" in seven years of US- Pakistan cross-border cooperation. This war of words and bullets stems from two colliding visions on how best to tackle the Taliban and its Al-Qaeda cohorts on the borderlands. There is no dispute over the magnitude of the danger. The Pakistan establishment, military and civilian, sees the spread of the Taliban as the gravest threat to Pakistan's integrity as a state. And President George W Bush has marked the Pakistan-Afghan border as the most dangerous place on earth, "the most likely place where a plot could be hatched to carry out any 9/11-type attack in the US." The dispute is over means. Bush and his military command believe the Taliban and Al-Qaeda must be destroyed by war, akin to the lethal counterinsurgency now raking through south and east Afghanistan. The Pakistan government says war has failed and peace must be tried, at least with the Taliban. "The Pakistan policy is damage limitation," says Rahimullah Yusufzai, a writer and expert on the Taliban. "It wants to end the suicide bombings in its cities and stop the infiltration of militants from the borderlands to the urban areas. The peace accords are a means to achieve this. But the Americans want the Pakistan army to participate actively in the border areas and stop the Taliban's cross-border infiltration into Afghanistan. And I think the Pakistan army has lost the urge to fight. It has suffered heavy casualties. Pakistan military commanders feel the policy of military operations in the border areas has not and will not deliver." They have a point. Cajoled by Washington, the Pakistan army since 2003 has engaged in a series of low intensity wars against its own people in a futile attempt to excise Taliban fighters and Al-Qaeda fugitives from the border. The policy has been a disaster. Not only did it radicalise the Pashtun tribes on both sides of the frontier and unleash a wave of retaliatory violence across Pakistan, it transformed the Pakistan Taliban from being a sidekick of its older Afghan sibling into an indigenous movement that now rules much of the border areas and parts of Pakistan's "settled" North West Frontier Province (NWFP). When Pakistan's new civilian government came to office in March it pledged a different approach. While promising to use force "as a last resort" against the Taliban, the emphasis rather was on political dialogue to woo back disenchanted tribesmen, and socio-economic development to bring the border areas onto a par with the rest of the country. There was also a determination not to see the Taliban and Al-Qaeda as the same beast, says Owais Ghani, NWFP governor and the man assigned the task of rolling back the Taliban. "It's important not to lump the Taliban and Al-Qaeda together. You have to separate them because both need different treatment. Al-Qaeda is global terrorism with a global design, agenda and reach. It needs to be dealt with in a different way. The Taliban are local and regional militants. They need a combination of military and political strategies." Such subtleties are lost on the Bush administration. Not only does it see any peacemaking as giving the Taliban and Al-Qaeda free rein in Afghanistan. It wants the Pakistan government to grant US forces the latitude to invade Pakistani border areas at will. Last January US commanders asked President Pervez Musharraf to allow stepped-up overflights to hunt down Al-Qaeda fugitives in the border regions. The aim was to "shake down" Al-Qaeda's command to get a better fix on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and Ayman El-Zawahri, preferably before Bush's exit from office next year. In March US envoys asked the new government whether it would abide by this "understanding". The answer was no: the coalition was aware that any US incursion into Pakistan would risk the charge that Islamabad was fighting "America's war". Since then there have been at least three US air strikes inside Pakistan. None have been coordinated with the government, say senior military officials. The deadliest was in Damdola near the Afghan border on 15 May: at least 15 people were killed, including an Al-Qaeda fugitive and an 11-year old child. Then, on 11 June, came the US rocket attack on the Pakistan border post. The Pakistan army said the first strike was "completely counterproductive" to its efforts to bring peace to the border areas and Afghanistan. It described the second as a "cowardly and unprovoked act of aggression". Washington has apologised for neither. And the fear in Pakistan's military is that US policy is now unconstrained by either Pakistani sensibilities or even by the impact of such actions on the war in Afghanistan. Policy now is being driven by Bush's domestic agenda. With less than six months left in office the US president may go to inordinate lengths to parade the scalp of bin Laden or El-Zawahri: as the election approaches it would partially mask the catastrophe of his policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Asked to rate the chances of a US military incursion inside Pakistan before the end of the year a senior officer in the Pakistan army was succinct. "Probable," he said.
