Jalaluddin Haqqani, the warlord brigand who with his extended family and an army of 10,000 tribal fighters rules a mountain kingdom in both Afghanistan's eastern provinces and neighbouring Pakistan's North Waziristan, is a throwback to the story of this region a hundred years ago and more.
He is a perfect fit for a part in Rudyard Kipling's stories of "the Great Game" between Britain and Russia for influence on the Northwest Frontier of India, or soldier-turned-novelist John Masters' memoirs of his days as a young Gurkha officer stationed at the limits of empire in the 1930s, or even the records of Field Marshal Frederick Earl Roberts of Kandahar and his punitive war against the Afghans in 1879.
But Jalaluddin Haqqani, his son Sirajuddin, who now manages the day-to-day running of the family business of murder, extortion and deadly intrigue, and their clan followers are a very modern problem.
The always tenuous alliance between the Pakistan army, the country's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) and the American-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan could well collapse because of the Haqqani network.
The implications of that for the efforts by ISAF to bring the war against Taliban insurgents down to an acceptable level of insecurity before handing over to the neophyte forces of President Karzai, as well as a violent parting of the ways between the United States and Pakistan, are too gloomy to contemplate.
The crux of the friction is that the U.S. military and the Central Intelligence Agency have believed for years that the Haqqani network is closely linked to and sometimes acts as an agent for Pakistan's ISI.
This persistent rumble of American mistrust of the dedication of their Pakistani allies came to a head last week.
Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff who for years has led the efforts to cooperate with the Pakistani military and intelligence services, publicly accused the ISI of colluding with the Haqqani network in the Sept. 13 attack on the American Embassy in Kabul.
"The Haqqani network acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency," Mullen told the U.S. Senate armed services committee.
And as Washington edges toward naming the Haqqani network as a foreign terrorist organization, Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani on Thursday sought national unity against the Americans.
He convened a highly unusual meeting with all political and religious parties to counter the American allegations and the implied threat that U.S. forces will enter Pakistan to clean out the Haqqani vipers' nest if Islamabad is unwilling to do so.
Coming soon after the May action when, without consulting Islamabad, U.S. special forces flew in and killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden at his hideout in the Pakistani military cantonment of Abbottabad, Gilani's anxieties about further encroachments on his country's sovereignty are understandable.
Gilani and his ministers insist their government has no functional relationship with the Haqqani network. Indeed, Interior Minister Rehman Malik has said it is the CIA that "trained and produced" the Haqqani organization during the mujahedeen war against the Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
It is true that like most mujahedeen groups, Jalaluddin Haqqani and his fighters received aid in the 1980s from the CIA in the proxy war against Moscow. Haqqani was even welcomed to the White House by then president Ronald Reagan.
But in the chaotic scramble for power in Afghanistan following the Soviets' withdrawal, Haqqani sided with the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban and became minister of tribal affairs when they took power in Kabul.
But with the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan 10 years ago to root out al-Qaida, Jalaluddin Haqqani and his men returned to managing the family business of brigandage.
The Americans blame Haqqani for the January 2008 attack on Kabul's Serena Hotel in which six people were killed, the July 2008 bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul on behalf of ISI, the December 2009 suicide bombing of U.S. base Camp Chapman in which seven key CIA officers were killed, the attack on Kabul's Inter-Continental Hotel this June and the Sept. 10 truck bomb attack on Combat Outpost Sayed in Wardak province as well as the Kabul U.S. Embassy attack days later.
For several years the Americans have been trying to kill the Haqqanis. In July 2008 one of Jalaluddin's sons, Omar, was killed by ISAF forces in Afghanistan.
The following September six missiles were fired by American drone aircraft at a Haqqani compound.
Jalaluddin and son Sirajuddin were not there. But among the 23 people killed were one of Jalaluddin's two wives, a sister, a sister-in-law and eight of his grandchildren.
That is not the kind of loss Northwest Frontier warlords are inclined to forgive or forget.
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