er, obtained an &quot;explanatory document&quot; from Congress this week<br />
that he said effectively waived some of the bill's more objectionable<br />
caveats. But this is unlikely to silence critics who draw on deep<br />
anti-American sentiment among the Pakistani public dating back to the 2001<br />
invasion of Afghanistan and the launch of George Bush's &quot;global war on<br />
terror&quot;.<br />
<br />
&quot;Poll after poll shows Pakistanis increasingly do fear the threat posed by<br />
Islamic extremists ... but they believe the US is an even bigger danger to<br />
their country,&quot; Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution&nbsp; was quoted as<br />
saying this week. Many Pakistanis rated the threat posed by the US to their<br />
independence and security above that from historical foe India, he said.<br />
&quot;Any time you out-poll India as the bad guy in Pakistan you are in deep<br />
trouble.&quot;<br />
<br />
Intense Obama administration pressure on Pakistan to root out the<br />
Tehrik-e-Taliban (Taliban Movement of Pakistan), close allies and<br />
collaborators of the Afghan Taliban, resulted in this spring's costly<br />
military offensive in Swat, in North West Frontier province, which displaced<br />
hundreds of thousands of civilians.<br />
<br />
Yet the Swat campaign is likely to be dwarfed by an imminent Pakistani army<br />
offensive in South Waziristan, in the ungoverned tribal areas adjacent to<br />
Afghanistan. Although senior Pakistani officials deny they are doing<br />
Washington's bidding, it's no secret that US commanders are increasingly<br />
focused on both sides of Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan, where<br />
Taliban militants and their foreign jihadi and al-Qaida allies have staked<br />
out common ground ignoring national boundaries.<br />
<br />
Pakistan's Taliban leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, who replaced Baitullah Mehsud<br />
after the latter was killed in a US drone missile strike in August, said in<br />
a recent video that attacks such as today's in Lahore would quickly cease if<br />
the government stopped behaving like a US lackey and broke its American<br />
alliance. If that happened, Mehsud said he would turn his guns on India,<br />
presumably in Kashmir. To many Pakistanis, that may not sound such a bad<br />
idea.<br />
<br />
The realisation that Washington is stoking a conflict approaching all-out<br />
civil war is gradually dawning in the US. New York Post columnist Ralph<br />
Peters drew a comparison with post-invasion Iraq. &quot;Civil war never quite<br />
happened [there]. Yet no one seems to notice that we're now caught up in two<br />
authentic civil wars &shy; one in Afghanistan, the other in Pakistan,&quot; he said.<br />
By lumping the two together in one &quot;Afpak&quot; policy, the Obama administration<br />
had effectively made both problems worse.<br />
<br />
Neither extra US troops, nor extra aid, nor more &quot;hugs-not-slugs<br />
counterinsurgency nonsense&quot; was the answer, Peters argued. &quot;The only hope<br />
for either beleaguered territory (these really are territories, not<br />
authentic states) is a decision by its own population to fight and defeat<br />
the Taliban.&quot;<br />
<br />
The impulse, fanned by this sort of imperial hubris, to get out of<br />
Afghanistan, or at least to narrow the fight to a counter-terrorism campaign<br />
against al-Qaida, has gathered US adherents in recent months. But a<br />
Washington Post editorial argued this week that with al-Qaida much reduced,<br />
the Taliban in both countries now constituted the main enemy. Pakistan was<br />
moving towards &quot;full-scale war&quot;, it said. Pulling back in Afghanistan could<br />
have disastrous, possibly fatal consequences there, too.<br />
<br />
By this measure and others, only one conclusion is possible: Pakistan is<br />
already so destabilised by US actions since 9/11 that it cannot be left to<br />
fend for itself. In such tortuous logic is found the death of empires.<br />
</span></strong></span></span></div>