Bombing Quetta?

By Robert Dreyfuss The Nation

If Afghanistan is Vietnam, and the Taliban is the Viet Cong, then, according to the analogy, Pakistan is North Vietnam. The really odd thing about that extended analogy is that, in the case of Vietnam, North Vietnam’s ally was the USSR. But Pakistan’s ally is, well, the United States.

Which points up the utter absurdity of the contemplated drone attacks into the Taliban’s refuge in Quetta, Pakistan.

For years, since the early 1990s at least, Pakistan has been the chief sponsor of the Taliban. When the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, only three countries recognized its rule: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. After 2001, when the United States invaded Afghanistan with its token force — in alliance with the India-backed Northern Alliance — Pakistan pretended to stop supporting the Taliban, but its military command and its intelligence service, the ISI, continued to provide not-so-covert support. Despite the eight year US war next door, Pakistan has refused to halt its support for the Taliban, and it has allowed the Taliban leadership to operate freely from safe havens inside Pakistan, from Karachi to the tribal areas in Pakistan’s northwest to, especially, the teeming urban center of Quetta, in the Baluchistan area of southwest Pakistan.

For weeks now, the United States has been telegraphing its intention to bombard Quetta in order to strike at Mullah Omar, the one-eyed pirate who leads the Taliban, and his confreres.

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