Daniel Twining: Remember What Happened the Last Time We Walked Away From Pakistan?

Daniel Twining is Senior Fellow for Asia at the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF).

A senior U.S. official -- Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- has publicly fingered the Haqqani network as a tool of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency. What's surprising is that this is particularly newsworthy: ISI's relationship with the Haqqanis has been an open secret for years. What's different, of course, is that the latest Haqqani attack was not on American forces deployed in Afghanistan but on the U.S. embassy in Kabul -- and that the U.S. government possesses unambiguous evidence of official Pakistani complicity in last week's assault.

In addition to killing American and allied soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and targeting American diplomats in Kabul, Haqqani forces have for years targeted Indian assets in Afghanistan, including several deadly assaults on the Indian embassy in Kabul. Skeptics of Pakistani denials of official complicity have long noted that the Haqqani network, based in North Waziristan, has never attacked an official target in Pakistan - further evidence of its collusive relationship with that country's security services.

The Haqqanis offer Pakistan's armed forces a high-impact, low-cost tool with which to advance the Pakistani military's foreign policy goals: hastening the Western drawdown in Afghanistan, putting Pakistan in pole position to shape an Afghan political settlement that marginalizes (and subjugates) the government in Kabul, and bleeding India while ensuring that its popularity among Afghans - and historic interests in Afghanistan -- does not translate into a bigger Indian strategic footprint on Pakistan's doorstep.

From the Haqqanis' perspective, the benefits are mutual: the elevation of their position as a core component of the Afghan Taliban (within which they are distinct from the Quetta Shura and other groups); generous and dependable Pakistani sponsorship (including military supply and intelligence support); a political writ from Islamabad that supports the Haqqanis' mafia-like (and richly rewarding) economic penetration of eastern Afghanistan; and a secure sanctuary in the Pakistani borderlands -- where they are safe (so far) from U.S. drone strikes on account of Washington's reluctance to anger Pakistan's general staff by blowing up a valuable strategic asset.

So has the U.S. calculus changed?..