Redrawn map has Pakistan wary

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A redrawn map of South Asia has been making the rounds among Pakistani elites. It shows their country truncated, reduced to an elongated sliver of land with the big bulk of India to the east, and an enlarged Afghanistan to the west.

That the map was first circulated as a theoretical exercise in some American neoconservative circles matters little here. (It accompanied an article by Ralph Peters titled "Blood Borders: How a Better Middle East Would Look," originally published in Armed Forces Journal.)

It has fueled a belief among Pakistanis, including members of the armed forces, that what the United States really wants is the breakup of Pakistan, the only Muslim country with nuclear arms.

"One of the biggest fears of the Pakistani military planners is the collaboration between India and Afghanistan to destroy Pakistan," said a senior Pakistani government official involved in strategic planning who insisted on anonymity as per diplomatic custom. "Some people feel the United States is colluding in this."

That notion may strike Americans as strange coming from an ally of 50 years. But as the incoming Obama administration tries to coax greater cooperation from Pakistan in the fight against militancy, it can hardly be ignored.

Pakistan, a 61-year-old country marbled by ethnic fault lines, is a collection of just four provinces, which often seem to have little in common. Virtually every one of its borders, drawn almost arbitrarily in the last gasps of the British Empire, is disputed with its neighbors, not least Pakistan's bitter and much larger rival, India.

These facts and the insecurities that flow from them inform many of Pakistan's disagreements with the United States, including differences over the need to rein in militancy in the form of al-Qaida and the Taliban.

The commander of American forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, got a taste of the challenge this month when he visited Islamabad and sat down with a group of about 70 members of Pakistan's Parliament at the residence of the U.S. ambassador, Anne Patterson. Their attitude showed an almost total incomprehension of the reasons for American behavior in the region after Sept. 11.

"A couple of the questions I got were, 'Why did you Americans come to Afghanistan when it was so peaceful before you got there?' " McKiernan recalled during an appearance at the Atlantic Council in Washington last week.

"Another one," he said, "was, 'We understand that you've invited a thousand Indian soldiers to serve in Afghanistan by Christmas.' "

There was no truth to the claim, he told the Pakistanis. "We have a lot of work to do," he told his audience in Washington.

Indeed, among ordinary Pakistanis, many still regard al-Qaida more positively than the United States, polls find. Talk shows here often include arguments that the suicide bombings in Pakistan are payback for the Pakistani army fighting an American war.

Some commentators suggest that the United States is actually financing the Taliban. The point is to tie down the Pakistani army, they say, leaving the way open for the Americans to grab Pakistan's nuclear weapons.

Recently, in the officer's mess in Bajaur, the northern tribal region where the Pakistani army is tied down fighting militants, one officer offered his own theory: Osama bin Laden did not exist, he told a visiting journalist.

Rather, he was a creation of the Americans, who needed an excuse to invade Afghanistan and encroach on Pakistan.