Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/concerns-mount-over-pakistans-security-amid-taliban-advance Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Taliban forces are reported to be advancing further into Pakistan, including an area some 60 miles from Islamabad. Pakistani envoy to the U.S. Husain Haqqani and former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlin assess the latest developments. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JIM LEHRER: Those Taliban advances have provoked debate and alarm in Washington. Margaret Warner has that story. MARGARET WARNER: The White House today called the latest Pakistani developments "very disturbing.""We're extremely concerned about the situation in Pakistan," said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. Yesterday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "The deteriorating situation there poses a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country." And Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen has arrived in Islamabad for consultations for the second time in two weeks.How threatening is this new Taliban advance? For that, we turn to Pakistan's ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani, and the former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlain. A former career foreign service officer, she served there from 2001 to 2002, and she's now president of the Middle East Institute.Welcome to you both.Ambassador Chamberlain, beginning with you, how strategically significant is this latest takeover of territory by the Taliban?WENDY CHAMBERLAIN, Former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan: Well, the headline is that Buner is only 60 miles from the capital city of Islamabad, but even that loses some significance. As the Afghan people learned in the '90s, the Taliban don't need to seize the capital in order to control the country.The real significance is that these extremists are now Pakistani extremists, Pakistani Taliban, that they have coalesced around a strategy, a strategy that worked in Swat, they've been emboldened by it, and that their goal is alarming. Their goal is to spread Sharia law, or their version of Sharia law, a harsh religious law, throughout the whole of Pakistan.Their goal is to topple the democratic government of Pakistan, and they have a strategy that's proved to be working, a strategy where they go into a district, go into a town, terrorize the local authorities, the civil society, the aid workers, women, barbers, impose their law, terrorize the people, and that the government has capitulated, capitulated to this brand of terrorism by signing an agreement, a Faustian bargain, to which they don't keep that bargain, and continue to move from district to district, creating little pockets of rot, perforating the country, which, in the end, may weaken it so that it will fall.