See American General Jack Keane’s interview with the BBC, very interesting http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-16832359
- it seems to follow the thinking in the US military on Pakistan that I marked out on in the epilogue of my book – see below:
Extract from the epilogue of my book: “War Against the Taliban: Why It All Went Wrong in Afghanistan,” in the bookshops now:
One final thought. In the five months from May until the end of October 2011, there has been a dramatic sea change in high-level American thinking, both military and political, caused first by the clinical extermination of Osama bin Laden, killed like a rat in a trap on 2 May in Abbottabad, Pakistan; an event which changed the world. And largely as a consequence, what might be called the Mullen-Tomsen school of thought has emerged, which basically says that the Pakistan Army, in the shape of its all-powerful spy agency, the ISI, is playing and has been playing for a very long time a dirty game of double cross with its hugely generous American allies, and this has to stop. Right now. ‘Or else,’ as Ambassador Tomsen put it.
So far the White House and Hillary Clinton have taken a softer line, holding out at least a sort of olive branch. But to back down now would merely encourage Pakistan to deny everything, as they have always done, on the principle that the bigger the lie the more people will believe it. Will the Americans finally get tough? Impose sanctions? Cut off the funding? We shall see. The future not only of Afghanistan but of much of the world may depend on it.
