The starting point for the Barack Obama administration's approach to the region is to treat it as an integrated whole, a single theatre of war, with very different rules on each side of the border, Richard Holbrooke, the US special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, told a gathering in Brussels yesterday.
"We must recognise that the heart of the threat to the United States, to the European Union, to Australia, to many other countries in the world including India and, I stress, including Pakistan itself, comes from western -- the people in western Pakistan," he said.
"The actual people who pose a direct threat to the countries represented in this room, the people who planned 9/11, who killed Benazir Bhutto, who committed the atrocities in Mumbai, who were terrorising Swat, who probably were associated with the attack on the cricket team in Lahore, who are associated with daily outrages -- they are not in Afghanistan. They're in Pakistan." He pointed out that these militants are based in western tribal areas "although it also extends down into Baluchistan." Success cannot be achieved in Afghanistan without solving the problem of western Pakistan, the envoy said.