NY Times
By Robert Mackey
As my colleagues Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah report from Pakistan, authorities there are concerned about the fact that “a strategically important district only 70 miles from the capital, Islamabad,” has “come under the effective control of the Taliban in the last several days.”
To understand more on the threat posed to Pakistan by Taliban militants, a good place to turn is to the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, who has been warning for years that the problem was being overlooked. As Ms. Perlez noted in an earlier article, Mr. Rashid’s insights are valued to such an extent that he “was invited to Washington just before the inauguration to attend a small foreign policy dinner with Mr. Obama.”
When his book “Descent Into Chaos” was published last year, Mr. Rashid made a series of appearances in the United States, many of which were recorded on video and posted on the Web.
One of those appearances was a talk he gave last June to a forum at the Carnegie Council, under the title “The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.” Mr. Rashid discussed the problems created by the Pakistani government’s decision to allow the Taliban to maintain sanctuaries in Pakistan.
The foundation posted video of the entire address, and a question-and-answer period that followed, on its Web site. It also posted a complete transcript and made excerpts like the one embedded below available on YouTube.
As Ms. Perlez explained in a profile of Mr. Rashid in The Times last year, Mr. Rashid is a former guerrilla himself (he went directly from Cambridge University to fight in Baluchistan in the late 1960s), and he was in Afghanistan to witness the entry of Soviet troops in 1979. He has been reporting on the militants on both sides of the porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border ever since and, as Ms. Perlez wrote, “One of his insistent themes is the seamlessness of the Pakistani Taliban and the Afghan Taliban. They reinforce each other, he said, and so cannot be treated in isolation.”
Some of Mr. Rashid’s thinking in “Descent Into Chaos” can be sampled in a review of the book in The New York Times last August, written by Raymond Bonner. Mr. Rashid is also a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, where he published an article on the development of suicide bombing as a jihadist tactic last year.
On Sunday, Mr. Rashid appeared on the CNN program “Fareed Zakaria GPS” to discuss just how close Pakistan has now come to the chaos that he warned of in his book:
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