In fact, Musharraf has been playing with fire for a while by conducting a very double-faced policy: pretending to be the friend of the West, while appeasing the Islamist forces in his country.
Proof of this duplicity is in abundance. First, when it comes to fighting off the Taliban in Pakistan's tribal areas, some troops from the Frontier Corps (a paramilitary group in charge of dealing with the Taliban) are pointing out to the lack of Islamabad's will to finish off the Taliban.
This is confirmed by an ex-Taliban leader, Mullah Zaher Akhound, who fled to Pakistan, and was told by the Inter Services Intelligence, the Pakistani intelligence to go back to "work." When he refused, he was jailed for one year. For Mullah Zaher, one thing is clear: From the start, the Taliban has been under Islamabad's control.
Another testimony confirms Zaher's statements. Indeed, according to Hekmatullah Modjadeddi, director of governmental national reconciliation commission for Kandahar (the ex-Taliban's capital), Pakistan is doing its utmost possible to prevent the Taliban from surrendering.
The ISI routinely threatens Taliban elements to hand them over to the Americans. And about a year ago, three Taliban commandants were killed in an explosion in Pakistan because they wanted to surrender.
According to him, among the ISI, there are three conflicting trends: the first one that fully cooperates with the Taliban, the second one that works with them for its own benefit and the last one that works as a mediator, sometimes helping us, sometimes not.
The alliance with the Islamists does not limit itself to the ISI. In fact, another telling example of Musharraf's duplicity is his party's alliance, for instance, in the provincial government of Baluchistan, to the Jamat Ulema Islam. The JUI is the religious party, which helped, along with the ISI, found the Taliban movement to conquer Afghanistan. JUI's extremism can be seen, for example, when it organized in Quetta (northwestern Pakistan) last spring a conference called "The martyrs of Islam."
During this conference, JUI's leader Fazlur Rahman asked his troops not to fight jihad against the government and the Pakistani army because it "would play into the hands of the Americans" who, according to him, are thinking about giving the Pashtun region of Pakistan to Afghanistan. But he added: "We support the struggle of the fighters of the Jihad in Afghanistan."
Interestingly, at that time, a banner hanging in one of the main arteries of Quetta read: "We will fill the minds of young Muslims with hatred of America."
In light of this, is propping Musharraf up the only game in town now that Bhutto has been assassinated?
It seems likely that the U.S. administration understands Musharraf's double game. But as long as he will from time to time show some results against al-Qaida, the U.S. will keep on supporting him -- because of a lack of viable options. In fact, Musharraf has been very astute as presenting himself as the last rampart against a fundamentalist tsunami that could take over the country. This all the more that Washington dreads the possibility of Islamists putting their hands on Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.
Musharraf went too far in his duplicity. Today, the same terrorists and Taliban he protected for domestic political reasons are not only fighting in Afghanistan and Kashmir but are also perpetrating more and more terror attacks on Pakistani soil, including the murder of Bhutto.
He is going to have to decide quickly which camp he belongs to because there is no middle road anymore.
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Olivier Guitta is a foreign affairs and counterterrorism consultant in Washington, D.C. and the founder of the newsletter The Croissant. (www.thecroissant.com)