Afghanistan fight takes our eye off the ball: Pakistan

Six months ago on the terrorist threat front, all headlines and Washington heavy hitters were focused on Pakistan.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton despaired that "Pakistan is in danger of falling into terrorist hands," while some opinion pages even called for an international invasion of Pakistan to stamp out al-Qaeda and stem Pakistan's descent into chaos.

Those articles didn't quite explain how that invasion wouldn't itself cause a descent into chaos, but that shows you the level of panic and lack of clear thinking. Afghanistan was nearly unheard of; Islamabad was crucial, Kabul a sideshow.

Now, it's hard to find mention of Pakistan, while Afghanistan and our travails there -- and American deaths there -- find daily mention. So Pakistan must be OK, and we can move to the next problem, right?

Wrong. And worse than wrong, because our habit of addressing foreign policy issues one country at a time is leading us to take our eye off the real issue -- which is Pakistan. Tunnel vision may increase costs in American blood, treasure and security, and worsen regional stability.

Countries do not generally come in handy, single-serve portions. More often they come with testy neighbors, uncertain borders, overlapping ethnic populations and complex histories.

We need to treat Pakistan and Afghanistan as a linked set of issues centered on Pakistan, or we risk choosing policies that will worsen, not improve, Pakistan's stability and that of the region as a whole.

Afghanistan is a feudal state of 32 million people with little modern economy and few ties to the modern world -- however attractive its terrain and colorful its people may be for those who have been able to spend time there.

The ethnically Pushtun Taliban permitted al-Qaeda to live in Afghanistan in the 1990s, true, but never showed any interest in international terrorism, or in controlling anything beyond Afghanistan's borders.

And al-Qaeda has been driven out to the even more remote precincts of Pakistan's tribal regions, and no longer has a meaningful presence in Afghanistan, according to National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones.

Pakistan, in contrast, has the sixth largest population in the world, is a lower middle-income country with important ties to China (and in the past with us), and has a nuclear weapons program -- the "Islamic bomb" -- home-grown by a Pakistani scientist who shared his expertise with at least some other countries.

Loss of control over that program, while likely overhyped, would make any plot that al-Qaeda comes up with pale in comparison.

And Pakistan has problems with Afghanistan, which our presence worsens.

First, their border, known as the Durand Line, makes no sense ethnically or geographically. It reflects simply how much territory the British controlled in 1893 when London gave up -- for the second time -- trying to rule Afghanistan as part of British India.

Second, the famously independent and ferocious Pushtun tribes, the source of most Taliban fighters, live in even larger number on the Pakistani side of the border.

Islamabad, worried about anything that would connect Pushtuns in the two countries in an effort to form a separate state, believes it must have a friendly, Pushtun-dominated government in Kabul. The Taliban government served that purpose, unpleasant as the Taliban may have been.

Now the Pushtuns in Afghanistan are angry because the American invasion pushed them from power, while the Pushtuns in Pakistan see their kith and kin across this meaningless border attacked, with U.S. drones also striking inside Pakistan. When any Pushtun, fighter or civilian, is killed, the entire family has an obligation of blood revenge.

Much of that anger focuses on us, of course, but the rest targets Pakistan's government for failing to prevent such attacks. Such anger leads young men to join the Taliban and their families to provide sanctuary for them, and further spreads the jihadist ideology that feeds terrorism.

So the more we fight in Afghanistan, the more we destabilize Pakistan. Even if we can "win" in Afghanistan -- however that is defined -- it will come with less stability and cooperation in the far more important country of Pakistan. We have to evaluate our priorities, and make sure the apparently urgent doesn't distract us from the truly important.

Last April, Obama's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, said that progress in Afghanistan depended on a stable Pakistan. He had these countries in correct order then; we should keep them that way.

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William Davnie retired after a 26-year diplomatic career in the U.S. Foreign Service and now lives in Minneapolis. He has traveled in Afghanistan and served in its northern neighbor, Tajikistan, as well as in Russia and Iraq.