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Wednesday, 09 December 2009 01:00

President Barack Obama's decision to escalate the Afghanistan war by sending in more troops also has serious implications for the United States in Pakistan.

Mr. Obama made it clear last week that he considers Pakistan and Afghanistan as part of the same theater of war within which American forces will operate until the conflict ends. Administration officials who visited Pakistan recently have told that country's military and civilian leaders that they face two alternatives. Either Pakistani military forces defeat the Taliban on the Pakistani side of the Afghanistan border, or the United States will increase the level and breadth of its own military activities inside Pakistan to complement the actions of U.S. and NATO forces inside Afghanistan.

The first alternative is one that the Pakistanis as a nation do not like. The way that this fragile nation has maintained its own autonomy and national unity since independence in 1947 is by a relatively relaxed approach to the different, competing elements of Pakistani society. This is at odds with the American approach to how Pakistan should be governed -- that is, with Islamabad using central government force to impose control on the tribal and other virtually autonomous areas in various parts of the country. The Obama administration has made it clear to the Pakistani authorities that if they don't do it the American way, the United States is going to impose that kind of control inside Pakistan with U.S. forces.

The second option, Washington has said, will involve both more and wider attacks by U.S. drone aircraft inside Pakistan, inevitably killing Pakistani civilians as well as Taliban, and more military incursions by U.S. special forces into Pakistan, in effect invading and occupying -- even if intermittently -- a country with which the United States is not at war.

How much U.S. military intervention will Pakistan put up with in return for the financial aid provided it? Or, how much U.S. military activity inside Pakistan will its government and military forces put up with before counterattacking U.S. forces, inside Pakistan or elsewhere?

We hope that U.S. political and military leaders have thought these dangers through to their likely conclusion and that the American people are prepared to accept a possible war with Pakistan as a regrettable consequence. Somehow we doubt it.

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