But paradoxically, U.S. officials’ “do more” chorus harps on. Speaking Friday in Australia, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Pakistan needs to do more to prevent Taleban militants from launching attacks into Afghanistan from its territory.

“We understand that it’s difficult, we understand that the northwest frontier area is difficult, but militants cannot be allowed to organize there and to plan there and to engage across the border,” Rice said. “So yes, more needs to be done.” Sorry, you have got it fairly wrong, Ms. Rice. It would only be easy for Pakistan to “do more” to stop Pashtun fighters intent on engaging U.S. forces from crossing the border if Pakistan’s leaders were willing to destroy their own country for the sake of the United States and its misbegotten plans.

For a thousand years no one has been able to subdue the independent-minded tribal warriors of northwest Pakistan, not even the British Empire at the height of its power when the proverbial sun never set on the Union Jack. Ms. Rice should read Winston Churchill’s war chronicles from his days in the region as a soldier war correspondent to learn what the tribal people did to the invading British troops and their local collaborators. Perhaps this was the reason why the British devised a special system of political administration to govern the tribal areas.

After independence in 1947, Pakistan approved an article of the Constitution that provided semiautonomous status to the northwest areas of the country, allowed its inhabitants to live according to their own culture and tribal traditions, prohibited the Pakistani army from initiating any kind of military action in the area, and required that local problems be solved through tribal councils. Later constitutions included similar articles that retained these provisions.

Since the U.S.-led coalition forces toppled the Taleban regime, occupied Afghanistan, and arm-twisted Pakistan into sending its army to the tribal areas, Pakistan’s entire Pashtun belt has been ablaze. However, unbeknownst to the bumbling strategists of the Pentagon, the Pashtun people follow a tribal code which emphasizes living and dying with honor, and revenge is the warp and woof of tribal life. The numerous civilian causalities in mostly Pashtun areas in neighboring Afghanistan at the beginning of the U.S.-led occupation kindled sentiments of revenge in the hearts of the Pashtun fighters of tribal Pakistan, who are often wrongly identified as Taleban by the Western media, and they started to infiltrate into the country to fight the U.S. troops and their allies.

The first gift a Pashtun child gets from his parents is not a toy but a real gun. And then his next task is to track down an enemy to try out his weapon. When that child becomes a man, he is not allowed to marry until he masters marksmanship. I have been to a Pashtun wedding party where we returned hungry because the bridegroom could not hit the target dangling from a tree over the bride’s home. The whole day the groom kept aiming at the target with his Kalashnikov, but night fell, the wedding was called off, and he was asked to return the next year after perfecting the art of riflery. Ms. Rice, these are the people the United States has come to fight, for whom it’s a Godsent gift to have the “infidel” forces in their cross hairs.

What better enemy could they hope for than invaders who openly call themselves crusaders? Clearly, no one can stop them from crossing the long porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan until the U.S. ends its occupation of the country. Pakistan’s leaders can only “do more” if they prioritize the United States’ interests over their own country’s, which would be a totally illogical move akin to sati.