Critical Triangle continues....

However, the import of his message was ignored, while the US administration’s focus remained on avoiding a Taliban victory and the capture of Osama bin Laden. When George Bush took over the presidency in the same year, their focus also remained on the same issue, to shift Pakistani support away from the Taliban, while others in the administration like Vice President Dick Cheney focussed on the possibility of Islamist radicals gaining access to its nuclear arsenal.

However, early during the Bush presidency, during the G-8 summit in Genoa in July 2001, perhaps the starkest warning came from President Putin of Russia. Presciently he warned that the Pakistan-Taliban nexus was funded by the Saudis and would “result in a major catastrophe,” with great vehemence.

While the Bush administration put the vehemence down to residual bitterness over the Pakistani role in the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Condoleezza Rice soon realised that “Pakistan’s relationship with the extremists would become one of our gravest problems.” However, Pakistani officials continued to lie with impunity denying that the “ISI or any part of the government,” armed or not, was supporting the Taliban in any way. Given the nature of intelligence sharing, it in this case the lack of willingness to share hard intelligence with Pakistan, the administration maintained a certain strained ambivalence to these claims.

To be continued....