Publications

What do you call an ally that tries to kill you? That's the question most Americans are asking in the wake of last month's dissemination by Internet clearinghouse WikiLeaks of some 92,000 classified U.S. military documents relating to the war in Afghanistan. The files provide a sobering portrait of the true state of play on the War on Terror's first front. Far and away the most damaging disclosures, however, are those relating to the pernicious role being played by Pakistan, long regarded as a critical American ally in South Asia, in supporting and sustaining the anti-Western insurgency there.

That a Pakistani-born U.S. national was responsible for the latest attempted terrorist attack on U.S. soil should come as little surprise. Pakistan has stood, almost unchallenged, at the epicenter of global terrorism for the post-9/11 era. Individuals or groups based in Pakistan have been involved in the majority of planned attacks on Western nations since 2001 and the country has played a critical role in the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Finally, nuclear-armed Pakistan maintains a network of Islamist militant groups focused on targeting India and is now host to a ferocious Islamist insurrection of its own; an insurgency that is now more deadly than those in either Iraq or Afghanistan. In short, no discussion of counterterrorism is complete without an examination of Pakistan and its role in Western terror attacks, the Afghan War, and its own attempts to combat domestic terrorism.