Pakistan girds for blowback on al Qaeda intelligence

By Simon Cameron-Moore

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - It has been an extraordinarily bloody start to 2007 in Pakistan, and analysts, intelligence officials and ordinary Pakistanis fear it is likely to get worse.

Vice President Dick Cheney this week asked President Pervez Musharraf to stop al Qaeda rebuilding in Pakistani tribal lands and stem the flow of Taliban fighters going to Afghanistan for a spring offensive against NATO and Afghan troops.

"The Americans will have said: 'If we find a camp, either you go in and destroy it, or we do it ourselves'," said Najam Sethi, editor of the Daily Times.

President George W. Bush is being asked to push Pakistan harder, not just by the American media, the think-tanks, but also by unhappy NATO allies, his own generals, and most recently Democrat lawmakers who want to make aid to Pakistan contingent on counter-terrorism results.

"There's growing uneasiness, not only among Democrats and not only on Capitol Hill, that things are going in a wrong direction in Pakistan," Robert Hathaway, director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, said.

Success against al Qaeda and in Afghanistan depends on Pakistani support.

"Increasingly, people of both parties, as well as apolitical people, understand that there's a possibility that we might lose this war in Afghanistan and until very recently that was a shocking idea for people who weren't playing close attention," Hathaway said.

The United States became intensively engaged with Pakistan and Afghanistan after al Qaeda's attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.

The possibility of al Qaeda planners based in the North Waziristan region mounting another successful terror strike on the West should haunt Pakistan, analysts say.

There are also the allegations, denied by Musharraf, that Taliban leaders actually run the Afghan insurgency from Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province.

"Pakistan could really show it was confronting the Taliban by arresting and putting on trial some of these so-called clerics recruiting and training suicide bombers," said a diplomat whose country has troops in Afghanistan.

It could also take out of commission any rogue intelligence officers supporting Taliban networks, U.S.-based analysts said.

RETALIATION

Having lost over 700 of its troops during three years of fighting, Pakistan signed an accord in September with militants in exchange for guarantees that they would cease attacks on the army, and stop crossing from North Waziristan into Afghanistan.

After the failure of military intervention, Musharraf has said he intends to strike similar agreements in other militancy-prone tribal areas where the state has little writ.