Pakistan could become next US nightmare

That's not my headline, it comes from the Sydney Morning Herald. The Australian newspaper "gets" what every American pundit, politician and media outlet seems to have missed - that Musharaff is no friend of the West and that his nation is a greater threat to American national interest than Iran ever could be.

First, it sets out the scale of the threat:

IT HAS more than twice as many people as Iran, six times more than Iraq, many primed for Islamic extremism by a legacy of poverty and illiteracy left by decades of misrule by corrupt secular leaders, civilian and military.

It already has nuclear weapons, and ballistic missiles made with North Korean help. It shelters jihadists battling Western forces across its border, and fanatical cells training Muslim youth in Western countries to put bombs on buses and metros.

If Iraq has turned into a nightmare for the US President, George Bush, think about Islamists gaining power in Pakistan, population 166 million, and their hands on its nuclear arsenal.

And then it notes that Pakistan hasn't exactly been a good friend to the West when it comes to Afghanistan and the Taliban. Pakistani border guards literally cheer as hundreds of Taliban fighters stream into Afghanistan to battle NATO forces. The Taliban's leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, openly holds his "shura" and training camps in the town of Quetta, the capital of Pakistan's Baluchistan province.

Pakistan's President and army chief, Pervez Musharraf, has been confronted several times this year, by Karzai, the British and the Americans, who have supplied addresses and phone numbers for Omar and his cohorts in Quetta.

Musharaff, meanwhile, gets $4 billion in US aid, access to advanced weaponry and, by duplicity, keeps his nation off the target list. But he needs the Islamists to continue his rule and to further his foreign agenda.

With the leaders of the country's two main secular parties, former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, in exile and opposing military rule, Musharraf relies on Islamists for domestic political support.

Principal among these is the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam party, which explicitly supports the Taliban and reinforces it with recruits from its madrassas (Koranic schools), and which the Pakistan Army and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency helped join ruling coalitions in both Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province.

As its founding patron, the ISI is said to be highly protective of the Taliban, keeping it in reserve in case Pakistan needs to regain control of its northern neighbourhood and transport corridors as "strategic depth" against India.

Musharaff, by backing the Islamists at home to shore up his power base while professing to hate them abroad in order to gain important concessions and aid from the West, has pulled off a "have your cake and eat it too" deal which exemplifies the absolute height of Pakistani business or political acumen. Washington insists on only seeing one half of that deal and that, as the Herald points out, "is turning out to be another big misconception in Washington".