Pakistan engaged in 'double game'

WASHINGTON -- President Bush arrived yesterday in Pakistan for a two-day visit that probably brings him closer than he's ever been to Osama bin Laden. But the United States' five-year dragnet appears no closer to nabbing the terrorist leader Bush once vowed to capture ''dead or alive," according to US and Pakistani officials and specialists.

While Pakistan has arrested hundreds of Al Qaeda suspects since 2001, almost all were rounded up in population centers such as Islamabad, Karachi, or Lahore. Bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, are believed to be hiding in the vast, mountainous region along the Pakistan-Afghan border, protected by Taliban fighters and sympathetic Pashtun tribes.

But President Pervez Musharraf, seeking to pacify the growing ranks of Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan who want to see a resurgence of the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan, has steadily shied away from aggressive action along the border and refuses to allow US troops to enter Pakistani territory in pursuit, the specialists said.

''The perception is that Pakistan is playing a double game," said Ali Al Jalali, Afghanistan's former interior minister and now a professor at the National Defense University in Washington. ''In both provinces that border Afghanistan, there is a coalition of religious parties in power, and they openly support the Taliban. In some areas, the Pakistanis do not have control, but in others they conveniently look the other way."

US leaders praise Musharraf -- who has survived two assassination attempts attributed to Al Qaeda -- for his help in the war on terrorism. Bush is expected to embrace the military leader during his visit, the first for an American president in six years.

Pakistani forces captured such key Al Qaeda operatives as Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and Abu Zubaydah, bin Laden's former operations chief.

''Pakistan has done more than any other country in the world in the war against terror," Tasnim Aslam, a spokesman for the Pakistani Foreign Ministry, said in a telephone interview this week. ''It's Pakistan that has apprehended more than 700 Al Qaeda and handed them over to the US. No other country has done that much, not even the US."

Nevertheless, bin Laden and his top lieutenants are still considered the most serious national security threat to the United States.

''Al Qaeda remains our top concern," John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, told Congress last month. ''The organization's core elements still plot and make preparations for terrorist strikes against the homeland and other targets from bases in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area."

But evidence is growing that Pakistan's efforts to flush them out of the ethnic and religious heartland of the Taliban and deprive them of their haven have grown less forceful as the political pressures on Musharraf mount.

''He has to walk a tightrope," said Michael Vickers, a former US Army officer who oversaw the CIA's covert efforts to arm the Islamic freedom fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s from bases in Pakistan. ''You still have some Islamist sympathies."

Tom Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, said the Pakistani government is ''juggling a very delicate political situation and as a result they have to pick and choose when they can do something that will please their American ally. But at the same time, they have to be very attentive to things that might upset their political applecart."

Pakistan, he said, has a ''fifth column movement on its own territory that provides underground support for the people who are fighting the greater jihad, which includes destabilizing Afghanistan, as well as carrying on the campaign [against India] in Kashmir."

The Pakistani government's desire to help the Americans while appeasing domestic fundamentalists was on display earlier this week in the border region, according to observers.

On Thursday, after a lull of several months, Pakistani military forces launched a major assault on a suspected terrorist training camp in North Waziristan Province and announced they killed more than 45 militants near the village of Saidgi. The assault ''knocked out a den of foreign militants," the Pakistani Army said in a statement.

But Pakistani operations to capture a high-value terrorist or attack suspected militants along the porous border always seem to pick up when a senior US official is about to visit, said US and Pakistani government officials and specialists -- apparently to convince their American allies they are serious.

''Within three days of a visit of an American official . . . some poor guys in the tribal areas get bombed," said Husain Haqqani, a former adviser to the president of Pakistan and now a professor at Boston University. ''Everything else has been a game of smoke and mirrors. No high-level Taliban figures have ever been arrested. Pakistan does not want to go after the Taliban because it wants them to remain agents of influence in Afghanistan."

Other analysts in the region agree that Pakistan acts most forcefully when it feels it has to appease the United States.

''The renewed activity by the Pakistani security forces came in the wake of complaints by the Afghan authorities that the Taliban had been indulging in hit-and-run raids in Afghan territory from sanctuaries in the Pakistani territory," said B. Raman, a former member of the Indian National Security Council.

But as long as powerful elements in Pakistan remain loyal to the Taliban and the government continues to influence events in neighboring Afghanistan, the search for Taliban leaders in western Pakistan and the Al Qaeda operatives they are protecting will remain static, specialists said.

''Are we satisfied?" asked Paul Pillar, who was the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005. ''Of course not. Do we understand there are some realities we have to deal with? Yes."

Jalali and Haqqani said those realities include Pakistan's historic need to use Afghanistan as a counterbalance against archrival India to the east. Solving the long-standing feud over Kashmir and other issues between the two nuclear powers would go a long way toward breaking the logjam -- and draining the support of the Taliban and fellow Islamic militants, they said.

''Pakistan has invested 50 years in Afghanistan as its satellite," Haqqani said. ''That won't change overnight."

Jalali added, ''As long as there is mistrust between India and Pakistan, Pakistan will keep its options open."

Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.