Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

Frontline Pakistan
She had the blessing of the army, which had been instrumental in her
usurpation in 1990. There was a marked difference in the situation
for Benazir compared to her first term in office. This time she had
a cooperative army chief, General Abdul Waheed Kakar, and a new
president of her own choice: Farooq Leghari was an old Pakistan
People’s Party loyalist. The troika operated harmoniously in contrast to
the discord that marked her first term. Learning from past experience,
she tried to appease the army and toed the line on sensitive foreign
policy security issues.
By 1994, the ISI was back in Afghanistan sponsoring the emerging
Taliban Islamic movement. It was in mid 1993, when some three
dozen Taliban got together at Kashke Nakud, near Kandahar in southwestern
Afghanistan, to voice their concern over the infighting among
the various mujahidin factions and lawlessness in the country. Taliban
is a Pashto word meaning students of a religious school or madrasa.
They come from the poorest section of the population and many of
them were homeless or orphans. The group, led by a former mujahidin
commander, Mullah Mohammed Omar, took upon themselves the task
of cleaning up their region of corrupt mujahidin commanders.
Mullah Omar, who had lost one eye in the war against the Soviet
forces and had retired to become a ‘Talib’ (student), had already become
a legend after he executed a mujahidin commander who had raped
two young girls near his village of Maiwand and left his body hung on
the barrel of a tank for several days. With this symbolic strike against
the mujahidin’s abuses of power, spontaneous expressions of support
came in from all over the district, and thus the Taliban were born. 29
In October 1994, Pakistani security officials contacted Mullah Omar
for the first time, seeking help for the safe passage of a convoy of
trucks transporting goods to Turkmenistan. Initially, the ISI, which
had long favoured the Afghan mujahidin faction Hezb-i-Islami led by
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, was sceptical of the Taliban. But Naseerullah
Babar, a retired general and Interior Minister in Benazir’s government,
saw the Taliban’s potential as a formidable political force that could
bring peace to the war-ravaged country and serve Pakistan’s longterm
economic and strategic interests.
The control of a friendly force in south-west Afghanistan could
open the prospect for an energy and trade corridor between Pakistan
and central Asia. Pakistan was keen to export gas from Turkmenistan
but that would only be possible through a pipeline via Afghanistan. 30
This was probably the reason why the USA, in the beginning, was