After the war ends in Sri Lanka, it is the Pashtun region of Southasia that will remain the most violent corner on earth. The depredations of the Taliban and al-Qaeda are set to continue, and new US President Barack Obama stepped into the White House with promises to withdraw from Iraq but get deeper into Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Obama intention is clearly to deal with the threat posed by al-Qaeda once and for all, so we should stand prepared for blunderbuss military action, drone attacks and extra-territoriality in crossborder forays. All of which will deliver more suicide bombers, assassinations and the collapse of fragile civilian regimes. It is important to consider the US involvement not as a fait accompli expanded, but rather to question whether the pain and dislocation in northwestern Southasia is justified by the Western interest.
The Pashtun region on the two sides of the Durand Line harbours the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, as well as non-Taliban militants. None of these, meanwhile, have anything in common with the secular and the Sufi, which are an intrinsic part of the local heritage. This is the region of Abdul Gaffar Khan, the Frontier Gandhi, who resolutely rejected the Subcontinent's partition on the basis of religion. The Pashtun hills and valleys are replete with the history of mendicants who sought an inclusive spiritual rather than ritualistic path to attainment.
This was the first region to adopt Buddhism outside the Ganga plain where the Sakyamuni lived and preached. And yet the descendants of the land blasted the Bamiyan Buddhas in a fit of blind barbarism, and al-Qaeda has introduced extraneous Arab and other elements. The Taliban and al-Qaeda ethos is condemnable where it seeks to interpret Islam in its narrow, doctrinaire manner, where women are relegated to the status of chattel, where the lives of others can be snuffed out on the basis of a cleric's call, and where suicide bombers entrap young men and women to wreak devastation.
The question is whether the American military push into Afghanistan and Pakistan is going to give release, with the increasingly unpopular Hamid Karzai in Kabul and the reluctant allies in the tottering new democracy in Islamabad. When it comes to Afghanistan-Pakistan, India is willing to remain silent spectator, letting the US take the lead. The Pakistanis feel there is a ganging-up against them; the non-Pashtun among the Afghans seethe in anger. Balochistan remains a powder keg, and the Kashmir question remains the age-old thorn. The Chinese and Iranians are nervous bystanders, one waiting to see how Xinjiang is affected by Islamic extremism on the one hand, the other keeping tabs on the evolution of politics in Balochistan and western Afghanistan.