'Pak army has taken control of foreign policy'

The Pakistani military has ousted the civilian government from the role making strategic decisions and has taken virtual control of the foreign policy, a noted and award-winning Pakistani journalist said on Tuesday. "Pakistan's military has virtually taken control of foreign policy and strategic decision making from the civilian government.Thus Pakistan's foreign policy reflects the military's obsession with India," wrote Ahmed Rashid in The Washington Post.

A well-known columnist, Rashid is author of several books including Descent Into Chaos: The US and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia." His book Taliban was updated and reissued this month. Rashid said Pakistan is convinced that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is allowing India to undermine Pakistan's western border regions through its four consulates in Afghanistan and has demanded that Afghanistan close the consulates.

"For a sovereign Afghanistan, this is an impossible request, but it is just the opening gambit in a looming test of wills. "Pakistan's maneuvers have prompted India to try reactivating its 1990s alliance with Iran, Russia and Central Asia, which supported the former Northern Alliance in a civil war against the Pakistan-backed Taliban regime," he wrote.

Rashid said Pakistan holds many of the cards as Taliban leaders and their families live in Pakistan and are in close touch with the military and its Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. "Some Taliban allies, such as the network led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, are even closer to the ISI. "Although the military is finally hunting down the Pakistani Taliban in the Northwest tribal areas, the Afghan Taliban and Pakistani extremists in Punjab province are being left alone," he said.

The January arrest of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the No 2 Taliban leader in Karachi, he said demonstrates to Kabul and Washington the Pakistani military's clout. "Karzai and most Afghans fear that if Washington waits too long to decide about talking to the Taliban, control will fall to the ISI as happened in the 1980s and 1990s -- when Washington abandoned Afghanistan to Russia and Pakistan but the ISI played favourites and was unable to end the civil war among Afghan factions," he wrote.

"Almost all Afghans, including Karzai's Pashtun supporters, the non-Pashtun Northern Alliance and even the Taliban oppose any major role for the ISI, as do most regional powers, particularly India, Iran, Russia and the five Central Asian republics," Rashid wrote.