The expulsion by Pakistan of journalist/researcher Nicholas Schmidle is the latest Musharraf effort to maintain his fiction that Pakistan is resolute in fighting terrorism and restoring democracy.
Steve Clemons, writing at HuffingtonPost, said "some believe that Schmidle's article (in the NYTimes Magazine) antogonized (sic) Pakistani government officials because he conducted interviews in Quetta where the Taliban are operating in full public. These sources suggest that Pakistan government authorities want to limit exposure to the fact that they have done nothing to shut down the Taliban in Quetta and/or are turning a blind eye to the Taliban's operations theres."
Schmidle's NYT Magazine article, "Next-Gen Taliban," described the internal political machinations in Quetta, in Baluchistan province, and the increasing instability generated by competing groups. "The emergence of Taliban-inspired groups in Pakistan has placed immense strain on the country’s Islamist community, a strain that may only increase with the assassination of Bhutto," he wrote.
That internal conflict and the resulting increase in militarism it's spawned has not spared even the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service. According to Schmidle, an "intelligence officer I met in Dera Ismail Khan, whose area of operations included the Taliban-ruled enclave of South Waziristan, maintains that his contacts with the militants were severed long ago. 'We can hardly work there anymore,' he told me. 'The Taliban suspect everyone of spying. All of our sources have been slaughtered.'"
Schmidle also revealed an interesting particular of what seems to be a desperate American diplomatic effort: US Ambassador Ann Patterson in September 2007 met with Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the head of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), described by Schmidle as "a hard-line Islamist party, widely considered a political front for numerous jihadi organizations, including the Taliban," and urged him to form an alliance with Musharraf and the late Benazir Bhutto.
Schmidle also contributed to Slate.com's "Dispatches," and reported on ethnic-inspired militancy in Baluchistan province, as well as the religio-political conflicts elsewhere.
The Pakistan People's Party (PPP) Punjab President, Makhdoom Shah Mehmood Qureshi, condemned Schmidle's expulsion, saying the "deportation is the continuation of a deliberate policy of persecuting the media since his article comprehensively detailed the intricacies of the establishment-Taliban nexus that has resulted in the strong presence of the Taliban across the length and breadth of the country."
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