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Pakistan should deal with its Taliban insurgency without US military help

Dogged by insurgency, Islamist terrorism, poverty and the failures of Asif Ali Zardari’s compromised government, Pakistan is a country in almost perpetual turmoil.

After 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the Pakistani Taliban offered protection to Osama Bin Laden and other leading Al-Qaida militants. Since then, bombers trained in Pakistan have frequently carried out numerous attacks on Nato troops in Afghanistan.

To counter this threat, the US, under both Bush and Obama, has given billions of dollars of financial aid to support the Pakistani army’s military operations in the lawless, mountainous badlands of Waziristan and the North-West Frontier Province, a region where Pashtun tribes have resisted attempts at rule since Alexander the Great. In addition, the US themselves have carried out bombing attacks with drones – unmanned planes directed by pilots thousands of miles away in the Nevada desert – and maintained a sizeable CIA presence in the country.

These counterinsurgency efforts, directed at Al-Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani network, an independent insurgent group, have been highly controversial...