The bad guys in that area do bring in their weapons from Pakistan, no doubt about it. However, much of that weaponry is purchased with money from a) drug sales, b) gem sales, and c) foreign (read Arab) money.

Foreign money is also used to pay local unemployed men to perform, as one officer I worked put it, “stupid human tricks.”

The “benighted tribes” in the area are mostly Pashtun, the tribe being split between Afghanistan and Pakistan by the arbitrarily drawn Durand Line which is still the border between the two countries.

This line is a major source of resentment among Afghans in general and Pashtuns in particular. It is a tangible sign of foreign meddling going back to the 1840′s, although the line was drawn in the 1890′s.

To the Pak Taliban, there really isn’t much of a difference between Pak Pashtuns and Afghan Pashtuns.

Most Afghans that I spoke with (and they were legion,) just accepted it as a matter of course that the Pakistani ISI was involved heavily with the Taliban and were still active in supporting them, including forays into Afghanistan.

One sure way to get detained by either ANSF or coalition forces was to be a Pakistani man found wandering about in Afghanistan. Afghans who had recently visited Pakistan were also suspect.

The Afghans seem to “know” that the Pakistanis meddle in Afghan affairs. They believe that Pakistan does not really want a stable Afghanistan. This is simply accepted as fact by street-level Afghans, whereas we do not take that as face value here in the States.