Bruce Riedel obviously knows what he is talking about.
He is a former CIA officer; a 'terrorism' expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington; worked as a senior advisor to three US presidents on Middle East and South Asian issues; was asked by US President Barack Obama to review an inter-agency of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan for the White House which he completed in March 2009. He has also written a book "The Search for al-Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology, and Future."
Now in an interview with the German magazine Spiegel he has cliamed that the West is "weary" of war in Afghanistan and is "looking for a way out", and would "like a political solution" and wants to negotiate with the Afghan Taliban and one possible negotiating partner within the Afghan Taliban would have been Mullah Baradar, who made it known he was ready to discuss the idea of holding talks but he was arrested by Pakistan because Pakistan does not want direct negotiations between the Afghan Taliban and the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai or between the Afghan Taliban and the West. It wants to control the process so as to ensure it gets its preferred outcome, which is a satellite state next to Pakistan. When Mullah Baradar started to talk about talks, the Pakistani intelligence service (ISI) had him arrested. He is being used by the ISI as a signal to the other Taliban to prevent them from taking independent action.
He told the magazine that Pakistan today was "already in the midst of a small scale civil war. Last year 25,000 Pakistanis were killed or wounded in terrorism-related violence, and that's just civilians. That's three times the number of civilians killed or wounded in Afghanistan in the same year. It is a very fragile, very volatile and very combustible country right now. In many ways it is the strategic prize in this whole equation. What happens in Afghanistan will have huge ramifications for what happens in Pakistan. A jihadist victory in Afghanistan would have enormous reverberations and could even signal a take over by jihadist forces in Pakistan."
He added: "For the first time, it [A jihadist takeover in Pakistan] is a real possibility. It could come in one of two ways. The Pakistani Taliban insurgence could grow and grow and grow, or, more likely, you could have a coup from inside the military by jihadist sympathizers. There is a lot of unrest in the Pakistani army because of their ongoing operations against militants. We could wake up one morning and have another Zia ul-Haqq in power in Pakistan, a committed jihadist."
