There’s a saying in Urdu that when you are going through rough times, your closest friends turn against you.

Well, you can’t really accuse President Hamid Karzai of being a friend of Pakistan. Even though he enjoyed the Pakistani hospitality for long years as a refugee in Quetta as he ran from the Russians and the Afghan jihad in 1970s and 1980s, he never counted himself among Pakistan’s friends. Actually, the feeling is mutual. There’s no love lost for the Afghan president in Pakistan either.

Yet the idea of Karzai in hot pursuit of Taleban into Pakistan is not easy to stomach — and not just for Pakistan. The land of the pure is surely going through real rough times when people like Karzai begin to threaten it.

The threat came soon after the US airstrike that killed 11 Pak soldiers last week on the Pakistani side of the border. Little did the Pakistani troops hunting the insurgents along the troubled frontier realize they were in turn being hunted by their American friends.

So this so-called war on terror and the Great Game in Central Asia gets interesting — and deadlier — by the day. It began with the Americans, NATO troops, the Afghan and Pakistani forces fighting the Taleban and remnant elements of Al-Qaeda.

Today, everybody seems to be fighting everybody else across this vast battlefield that stretches from the Pak-Afghan border with Iran to the border with Tajikistan. No one knows who is on whose side. And no one seems to have the faintest idea what they are fighting for. As in Iraq, the goal posts in this US war too keep shifting — from fighting terror to promoting democracy, whatever that means. Understandably, the people of Afghanistan have been the real victims of this war. But they’ve long been used to this permanent state of war. Their fate seldom seems to change, even though the pretenders to rule them keep changing faster than you could say the Khyber Pass.

Since long before the coalition of the willing began carpet-bombing Afghanistan in the name of peace, this great land has been witness to an endless pageant of invading armies — from Alexander the Great to the Russian commies.

None of those invaders were able to tame the wild, free-spirited Afghan though. No one ever has. Even the wily Brits with their mantra of “divide and rule” failed to conquer Afghanistan. You can invade and attack it but you can’t rule this lawless territory. The great Soviet Empire with the world’s largest army and nuclear arsenal that kept the US presidents awake at night blew itself up trying to rule it.

And now another superpower is stuck in Afghanistan as it persuades itself and its dispirited allies that they can still win this war.

That this war has entered a critical phase is evident from the reckless talk of Karzai. Either the Afghan leader thinks he can get away with this at a time when Pakistan is preoccupied with its own existential woes. Or he has been given the not-so-subtle signals from Washington to turn up the heat on Islamabad.

Whatever the explanation, it’s a message to Pakistan that its stock in Washington and in the region has dramatically fallen.

For how someone so critically dependent on his Western friends for his own survival could make faces at the nuclear-armed Pakistan? Especially when Karzai’s reign in Afghanistan hardly extends beyond the presidential palace in Kabul?

The mighty Afghan Army that he is threatening to unleash on Pakistan ran for its life when Karzai came under attack in April at a military parade in Kabul. This is an ultimate affront to Pakistan, the country of 170 million people that sees itself as the leader of the Muslim world and in the league of big players like India and China. Boasting one of the most professional armies in the world, it fought three big wars against a giant like India.

So what a fall for Pakistan that weightless wonders like Karzai should threaten it! But the people of Pakistan have to look no further than Islamabad to know who is to blame for this state of affairs.

The man who once regaled us all with his Enlightened Moderation is also responsible for many of Pakistan’s woes today. Perhaps no other country has suffered as much as Pakistan has by joining the neocon war on the Muslim world. Thanks to Musharraf, the country has become the main front of the West’s war. Which will continue long after Bush and Mush have hung up their boots and retired.

But if Pakistan, Afghanistan and just about everyone associated with this war is feeling the heat, the US itself is unlikely to emerge any better either when this whole business is over. If the two Great Wars transformed the Empire in which the sun never set into a bankrupt island, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq threaten to do the same to the most powerful country on the planet.

— Aijaz Zaka Syed is a Dubai-based journalist and commentator.