Pakistan is Playing Both Sides of the Fence... And It's Inarguable

They're refusing to launch any action aimed at the Haqqani network.

Pakistan will not launch an offensive against Haqqani extremists despite Washington ramping up the pressure after a series of attacks on US targets in Afghanistan, an official said on Monday.
The US and Pakistan are key allies in the war against Islamist militants in Afghanistan, but their relationship is often troubled and hit new depths after the killing of Osama bin Laden in a covert US raid in Pakistan in May.
Pakistan's army chief of staff gathered together his top generals in an extraordinary meeting at the weekend after a series of stinging rebukes from the Americans blaming the Haqqanis and Pakistani intelligence for recent attacks.
Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani is now expected to call a rare cross-party conference, although he has dismissed the American allegations as little more than finding a scapegoat for US "disarray" in the 10-year war in Afghanistan.
"I don't think the indicators are as such," a senior Pakistani security official told AFP when asked if the army was going to launch an operation in North Waziristan, near the Afghan border, where the Haqqani leadership is based.
Instead, he said, the military needs to "consolidate gains" made against local militants who pose a security threat elsewhere in Pakistan's lawless tribal belt that Washington has branded an Al-Qaeda headquarters.
Pakistan has around 140,000 troops based in its troubled northwest and says more than 3,000 soldiers have been killed since 2001 -- more than the 2,735 Western soldiers to have died fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But their duplicity has being going on a while. Back in 2007, they ambushed a US/Afghan delegation they'd just hosted for a meeting.

A group of American military officers and Afghan officials had just finished a five-hour meeting with their Pakistani hosts in a village schoolhouse settling a border dispute when they were ambushed — by the Pakistanis.
An American major was killed and three American officers were wounded, along with their Afghan interpreter, in what fresh accounts from the Afghan and American officers who were there reveal was a complex, calculated assault by a nominal ally. The Pakistanis opened fire on the Americans, who returned fire before escaping in a blood-soaked Black Hawk helicopter.
The attack, in Teri Mangal on May 14, 2007, was kept quiet by Washington, which for much of a decade has seemed to play down or ignore signals that Pakistan would pursue its own interests, or even sometimes behave as an enemy.

They had tailed bin Laden's couriers to Abbotabad and decided it wasn't worth detailed investigation.

They shut down Afghan peace talks because they weren't at the table and claimed that they "protect" the Taliban.

Is it any wonder that you've got a US Senator calling for military action against Pakistan?

A Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee said Sunday that the U.S. should consider military action against Pakistan if it continues to support terrorist attacks against American troops in Afghanistan.
"The sovereign nation of Pakistan is engaging in hostile acts against the United States and our ally Afghanistan that must cease, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told "Fox News Sunday."
He said if experts decided that the U.S. needs to "elevate its response," he was confident there would be strong bipartisan support in Congress for such action.
Graham did not call for military action but said "all options" should be considered. He said assistance to Pakistan should be reconfigured and that the U.S. should no longer designate an amount of aid for Pakistan but have a more "transactional relationship" with the country.
"They're killing American soldiers," he said. "If they continue to embrace terrorism as a part of their national strategy, we're going to have to put all options on the table, including defending our troops."

By: Brant