Pakistan’s future is at stake. The coordinated attacks which rocked Lahore, Peshawar, Rawalpindi and others in recent days are tantamount to a declaration of war by the Pakistani Taleban and groups allied with it on the state and its institutions.

For the third time in five years, the Pakistani Army is marching into rebellious provinces bordering Afghanistan — where an eight-year war is raging on the other side — in an attempt to conquer more than ten thousands armed Pakistani Taleban entrenched in South Waziristan.

The next thing that will happen in Pakistan will have serious repercussions on the security of Western Asia, the Gulf and the Middle East. Since its tumultuous birth as a state in the middle of the last century, Pakistan has been embroiled in wars on different fronts, while control of government oscillated between the military and auspicious political dynasties. Always bogged down by chronic instability, Pakistan remained a keystone state in an arch stretching from Sri Lanka in the south to Iran in the north through India and Afghanistan.

Until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dispersion of its central Asian Republics, Pakistan had been one of the largest US intelligence bases in Western Asia with the aim of monitoring the borders of western China, India and southern USSR. The alliance with the United States resulted in a growing influence of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, especially during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the West’s support to the Mujahedeen, including Arab and Afghan militants, among them Osama bin Laden and his associates.

But cooperation with the United States during the Cold War did not weaken the conviction of Pakistan’s political and military elites in the integrity of country’s central cause; Kashmir. The enclave with its majority Muslim population has been under Indian occupation since independence, and the two countries came close to an all-out confrontation over it a number of times. Indo-Pakistan rivalry soon led to a heated arms race which catapulted both countries into the nuclear club in the late nineties of the last century.

Political realities have changed drastically since then; India and America are now allies and the West is stuck in a frustrating war in Afghanistan, which began in Manhattan in 2001 and may finally be resolved in the Helmand province in the near future. It is a war against a fundamentalist jihadist movement which once enjoyed the backing and support of Pakistan’s leading intelligence agency along with that of some Arab regimes in the eighties before all lost control.

Al-Qaeda is no longer the main archenemy in this war which is raging on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan borders. The Taleban, which cultivates the support of the mainly Sunni Pashtun tribes, is today a full-fledged movement which may end up deciding the future of who runs the show in both Kabul and Islamabad. 

From a geopolitical point of view, the alliance of Pashtun and Uzbek tribes means that a sectarian and ethnic conflict could spread in the future to include other countries in a larger circle whose parameters reach up to Central Asia and Iran’s eastern outskirts.

We must worry about the future of Pakistan, the sole nuclear Muslim country, at a time when the government is launching a war that is unlikely to resolve the conflict in Waziristan. The prospects look grim when more than one senior Western military commander predicts failure of NATO’s strategy in Afghanistan. Maybe this is why the Obama administration is now adopting a dual Af-Pak strategy to prevent a fall of dominoes across the borders.

The difference between the fight against Al-Qaeda and the Taleban is radical, because while the former wants an open-ended conflict with the United States and the West, the Taleban are homing in on a specific goal; to expel the West from Afghanistan and topple the government allied with it in Pakistan. It is slowly becoming a realistic goal in light of the failure of the West’s policies and its inability to secure victory militarily.

The fall of Pakistan into an abyss of chaos and violence will increase the chances of major confrontations in a region of extreme importance and sensitivity. It is as close as we can possibly get to a scenario resembling 1950s Eastern Europe, 1960s Cuba, or 1970s Middle East.

— Osama Al Sharif is a veteran journalist and political commentator based in Jordan.