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Nicholas Shmidle writes that despite the shaky relationship between the United States and Pakistan in the wake of the WikiLeaks documents release, Pakistan plays an important role in Washington's Afghanistan policy.
Earlier this year, the relationship between Pakistan and the United States suddenly seemed to get a lot more productive. In the first two months of 2010, Pakistani security forces arrested six individuals touted as senior Afghan Taliban leaders. In January, administration officials claimed that CIA drones had targeted and killed Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, in the tribal area of South Waziristan. And in February, American and Pakistani intelligence operatives netted Mullah Baradar, described as the Afghan Taliban's military commander, in a raid in Karachi. Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who is now with the Brookings Institution, said Baradar's arrest represented “a sea change in Pakistani behavior.”
But this newfound helpfulness was only a mirage. The trove of military and intelligence documents released in late July by WikiLeaks has dashed any optimism that Pakistan's intelligence agencies turned a corner this year. (And Mehsud, it emerged, in fact survived the drone attack.) The leaked reports show that as recently as 2008, Pakistani spooks working for the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, were allegedly orchestrating suicide bombings in Afghanistan and hatching plots to kill GIs with poisoned booze. ISI officers also reportedly counseled Taliban fighters in attacks against American soldiers. Their support for the Taliban, in other words, was not only moral, but tactical, too.
The leaks offer the clearest illustration yet that even as Pakistan received billions of dollars in American aid, it was actively sabotaging the war in Afghanistan. Yet the United States can't afford to dump Pakistan—which means that nothing substantive is going to change.