Mark Pine

America and its Afghanistan war allies are trapped in a conflict in which one of those allies is a traitor.

Pakistan, an essential partner in the war effort, is internally split in two. One of those two parts appears to be actively working to aid the enemy, the Afghan Taliban. That is a main conclusion to be inferred from the Afghan War Diary, 2004-2008, a trove of documents written by American soldiers and intelligence officers fighting in the Afghanistan conflict. The documents were recently leaked from American military files to the Guardian, the NY Times, and Der Spiegel, leading news organizations in nations involved in the war effort.

A report on the documents in the Times on Sunday recounted several of them describing a component Pakistan’s intelligence service (ISI), the “S Wing,” planning and carrying out attacks on American forces.

One of the documents told how a former director of the ISI, Hamid Gul, met with militants in a city near the Afghanistan border, Wana in South Waziristan in January 2009. There they planned an attack to retaliate against a CIA drone attack on militants a few weeks earlier.

The Times article also said that Gul offered to allow the Taliban to use the Pakistan border region as a base if they concentrated their attacks inside Afghanistan. And it said that the ISI established networks of suicide bombers for attacking in Afghanistan.

On Sunday, the British news organization, the Guardian, also published an article on the documents. Some of them disclosed embarrassing details of the American effort in Afghanistan, including drone attacks and special forces missions to assassinate Taliban leaders.

Should America withdraw from Afghanistan? If Pakistan—or at least one part of that nation’s fragmented, schizophrenic government—continues to allow Taliban militants to use its territory as a base of operations from which to attack American and coalition forces in Afghanistan, then our military efforts there may be futile. Moreover, if America continues to commit questionable actions that some might consider war crimes, then in losing the war, our nation will also lose international influence and moral standing.

Most Americans want the U.S. to set a timetable for withdrawal of our forces, according to a CBSNews poll earlier this month. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as pulling our troops out.

Pakistan is playing a double game. The nation is ostensibly our ally in the war against the terrorists. But, as the Times explained in an editorial yesterday, the ISI is maintaining its influence in Afghanistan in the expectation of an American withdrawal. But the means by which the ISI tries to hold onto power in Afghanistan works to undermine America’s position there.

The problem this presents to our nation, however, is as much a problem in Pakistan as Afghanistan. Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and the greatest danger for America and many other nations is the possibility that Pakistan’s nuclear force would come under the control of Islamic militants in that nation. To my mind, such a danger constitutes a far greater threat to us than our losing the Afghan conflict.

Our effort in Afghanistan is most importantly one theater of conflict in a fight going on in Pakistan, as well. We are waging a shooting war against the Afghanistan Taliban, but we are also waging a war of influence in the conflict between pro-West, pro-democracy groups and anti-Western Islamic factions in Pakistan.

Right now, the Times says, the Obama administration is working to strengthen our good relations with Pakistan through economic aid and a fragile military alliance. At the same time, we trying to destroy the Afghan assets of the anti-Western factions of the Pakistani government and thus working to neutralize them. This may be the most far-reaching aspect of our efforts in that region. Because of the potential consequences—the possibility that the terrorists might gain control of a nuclear armamentarium—they are not efforts we can withdraw from.