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The Pakistan ProblemWill Pakistan's instability make the Afghan war unwinnable?

By Fred KaplanPosted Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2009, at 6:38 PM ET

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The key facts here are that, at the moment, there is no working judicial system of any sort in the Swat Valley—and that the Taliban militias have routed the numerically superior Pakistani army in their armed confrontations. So the deal imposes national secular authority even more than it legitimizes sharia justice. And given the balance of power, it's unclear why the Taliban would go along with that.

The deal was made not with "the Taliban" as a whole—the term implies a more cohesive entity than actually exists—but rather, specifically, with Maulana Sufi Muhammad, whom the Pakistanis arrested two years ago for leading jihadist raids across the border into Afghanistan. He was released from prison after agreeing to give up the struggle and to work for peace.

The hope is that he would strike a deal with his son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah, who is the deputy to a much more militant Taliban leader—or that, if he can't come to terms with his son-in-law, a wedge might be driven between various Islamist factions, peeling Sufi Muhammad and his followers away from the radicals and thus strengthening the hand of the central government.

However, Daniel Markey, a specialist on Pakistan at the Council on Foreign Relations, doubts this stratagem will work. "It assumes the militants will accept the authority of the Pakistani state," he said in a phone interview today. "Why should they?"

There is nothing wrong in principle with trying to negotiate deals with Taliban factions. Gen. Petraeus has openly said that such deals will have to be a part of any successful strategy in Afghanistan. However, Petraeus and other officers make two points about such negotiations: First, it's futile to go down that road with hard-core Taliban; second, to the extent negotiations succeed with any faction, we need to enter into them from a position of strength.

The deal in Pakistan breaks both rules: Pakistan's political leaders are trying to craft a deal, indirectly, with the hard-core Taliban, and they're entering into it from a position of obvious weakness.

This is why the deal is not only ill-fated but potentially disastrous: It reveals the severe weakness of the Pakistani state. The politicians pursued the deal only because the state cannot control its own territory. Unless Sufi Muhammad can convince his son-in-law to accept peace and obeisance to secular authority in exchange for a parcel of land where Islamic law carries some weight, the deal is more likely to convince the militant Taliban simply to press on for more favors still.

Or, if they're lucky, the deal will simply collapse, as similar deals have collapsed in the past, and the struggles will rage on.

Whatever President Obama decides to do in Afghanistan, the real danger lies in Pakistan, and its problems lie beyond the powers and jurisdiction of the U.S. military or NATO.

A solution, if there is one, will be maddeningly complicated. It will require a semblance of order on the Afghan-Pakistani border (good luck, Richard Holbrooke) and the Pakistani army's willingness to be trained in counterinsurgency operations by foreign armies or advisers. This, in turn, will require a calming of the border between Pakistan and India—so that the Pakistani military feels secure enough to redeploy troops away from its traditional external rival toward the much more real threats from within. And an Indian-Pakistani settlement will probably require security guarantees from several powers in the region—which will involve the powers negotiating on goals and means as a precondition. Finally, all these steps will have to be taken at roughly the same time; success in each realm will depend, to some degree, on successes in the others.

Diplomacy has rarely had to be managed on so many wobbly layers. But the alternative is too awful to allow.