ABSTRACT
The situation unfolding in Afghanistan is paradoxical and dangerous. Policy makers in the US, according to Johns Hopkins University foreign policy professor Michael Mandelbaum, ‘are dealing with states and leaders who either cannot or will not deliver. The issues that we have with them look less like problems that can be solved and more like conditions that we [US] have to manage’. 1 One would not like to join issue with the professor to find out who is responsible for initiating the process which has caused the present mess. The fact of the matter is that the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is so interlinked that Richard Holbrooke, US Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, has said:
if Afghanistan had the best government on earth, a drug-free culture and no corruption, it would still be unstable if the situation in Pakistan remained as today. This is an undisputable fact, and that is the core of the dilemma that the Western nations, the NATO alliance, face today. 2
