The Middle East Times recently had an interesting commentary concerning Musharraf and the Taliban.

Some 60,000 U.S. and NATO forces now in Afghanistan is a deceptive number, as all of NATO’s European forces — with the exception of the British and the Dutch — are hamstrung by caveats imposed by their parliaments against offensive operations.

Some 120,000 Pakistani troops (up from 100,000 in recent months) are now stationed in FATA. Strung out in more than 1,000 hilltop outposts overlooking infiltration routes in the valleys below, they complain about U.S.-supplied, obsolete night-vision equipment that is useless by moonlight. Inside the largely lawless FATA, the population is for the most part sympathetic to the jihadist insurgency. The jihadists also have sympathizers among the Pakistani-trained Frontier Corps, drawn from the local population and officered by Pakistani regulars. There is a widespread belief in the U.S. intelligence community of collusion between Pakistan’s intelligence services and the Taliban leadership.

Increasingly, the U.S. command in Afghanistan is launching drones, equipped with precision-guided bombs and missiles, against intelligence-generated targets of Taliban venues. This is seen in Pakistan as violating their sovereignty, but there isn’t much they can do about it, given that Taliban-in-Pakistan, a separate command from Taliban-in-Afghanistan, has ordered suicide bombings from the North-West Frontier Province to Sindh province in the south.

The unknown in the Pakistani imbroglio is Nawaz Sharif and Saudi Arabia, where he spent seven years in exile after being deposed by Musharraf’s 1999 army coup. U.S. influence in Pakistan is waning while the Saudis’ is waxing. The kingdom’s Wahhabi clergy have been funding many of Pakistan’s 12,000 madrassas since long before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Libya and the United Arab Emirates also have kicked in sizable sums for these one-discipline Koranic schools. Prior to Sept. 11, only three countries — Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Pakistan — recognized the Taliban’s tyrannical theocracy in Kabul.

A Pakistani source just back from the Khyber Agency in FATA told this reporter Monday that posters of Nawaz Sharif were much in evidence. The people he spoke with were “extremely happy that Musharraf and the U.S. are leaving the scene.” Roadside stores were selling all types of arms (including rocket launchers) and ammo. Taliban in black turbans were roaming joyously in stolen vehicles.

The author clearly recognizes what we have already discussed in detail concerning the NATO troops, i.e., rules of engagement prevent their effectiveness.  But take particular note of his last paragraph.  People in the FATA are happy about Mesharraf and the U.S. leaving the scene.

Now take note of a recent Asia Times commentary on the departure of Musharraf.

“Musharraf had lost his utility as a useful asset for the ‘war on terror’,” retired general Hamid Gul, a security analyst and former director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), told Asia Times Online.

“The Americans had been putting pressure on Islamabad since February for him to get its act together against the Taliban and al-Qaeda and Pakistan’s foreign minister [Shah Mahmood Qureshi] and Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani, always told Washington that the government could not move forward independently because of Musharraf,” Gul said.

So was Musharraf the great killer of Taliban, or the vacillating, inept stooge he is made out to be by Gul?  In fact, Musharraf walked a tight rope, staying in power while the Taliban grew.  He could never recover from the theme of partial confrontation of the Taliban, and each side sees in his demise a benefit for their own cause.

In the case of the the Pakistani Army, quick (and quickly ended) strikes into the FATA won’t work.  Pakistan is facing an insurgency, and counterinsurgency is waged by protracted presence with the population.  Thus far, this is something they haven’t been willing to do.