A Pakistani thorn in the American side
The long arm of the US “war on terrorism” employs remarkably tender gloves when it comes to Pakistan, the original backer of the Taleban movement that offered Osama bin Laden sanctuary as he plotted the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks _ and the only state in the Muslim world certainly known to possess weapons of mass destruction.
Billions of US dollars in military and economic aid have poured into the country since then, although, before the attacks, Pakistan was more often cited as a sponsor of international terrorism. It had backed ruthless cross-border insurgencies in Kashmir and India, developed a nuclear weapons program that provoked US sanctions and acquired banned technologies from North Korea, China and Iraq. After bin Laden’s arrival in Afghanistan in 1996, Pakistan’s all-seeing Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency turned a blind eye to the passage through its airports of tens of thousands of graduates from his training camps on their way to attacking their foes.
Throughout the 1990s, Pakistan routinely sub-contracted its foreign policy objectives to movements like the Taleban, or jihadi groups like Harakat al-Mujahedin, assigning officers and NCOs to train and advise them. In 1999, India and Pakistan barely escaped going to war again after Pakistani-backed mujahedin and their allies in the regular army transgressed the Line of Control that divides the Indian and Pakistani parts of Kashmir.
That same year saw Pakistan’s corrupt democracy again overthrown in a bloodless coup that brought President General Pervez Musharraf to power. For half of its 56-year existence, Pakistan has been ruled by a military that, despite a series of draconian IMF programs, is still the country’s largest corporation, dominating the transport, construction and banking sectors to the exclusion of the private sector.
**In short, Pakistan is everything that President George W. Bush claims to despise: a military dictatorship that is also
an anti-freedom, anti-free market **
Islamic state which sponsored international terror in the past, is dangerously unstable and has a first-strike nuclear capability trained on its more secular and successful neighbor, India. Yet it is also America’s closest ally in the South and Central Asian region. What can possibly make such a marriage work?
The short answer is that it doesn’t really work. However, with no Muslim country in the region that is more stable than Pakistan, Washington has had to accept the current situation, at least when it comes to military cooperation, which still preoccupies Washington to the exclusion of all other considerations.
In the first days of the war on terror, when America’s focus was on the Taleban and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Bush’s military and intelligence advisers had a hard, strategic choice to make: whether to identify and target all the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks, or only those against which it was possible to launch effective military action. The result was that, despite all the evidence proving collusion between the ISI and Al-Qaeda, Pakistan was granted an unofficial pardon for its past crimes, in exchange for becoming America’s strong right arm in the regional fight against terrorism.
Pakistan’s motives for entering the alliance with the US were defensive. Yet today its commitment remains less than enthusiastic and bin Laden is still believed to be hiding in the lightly governed Pakistani tribal lands near the Afghanistan border. This is testimony, many say, to the selectivity that rules the Pakistani military’s conformity with Washington’s priorities.
Nevertheless, Islamabad did make the right noises during the Afghanistan war: It banned the jihadi groups it had fostered; purged the ISI of its pro-Islamist officers; and made its airspace and military facilities available to the US military. The rewards of compliance were generous: the rescue of Pakistan’s economy, military power and international reputation. Musharraf drove a hard bargain, demanding, and getting, the lifting of US sanctions, the rescheduling of Pakistan’s foreign debts and an enormous influx of aid. In June, Bush pledged $3 billion in assistance over three years, and last week Pakistani officers visited Washington with a shopping list of weapons and spare parts, including 40 brand-new F-16 jets, with a total value of $9 billion.
The similarities between America’s treatment of Pakistan after Sept. 11 and its treatment of Saudi Arabia, another ally with unofficial Al-Qaeda ties, invites comparison of the esteem in which the two are held in Washington. In the same way the US has shielded Saudi Arabia and assuaged the kingdom’s sensitivities, it has also failed to mention Pakistan’s past misdemeanors. Scour the US congressional report on the Sept. 11 attacks and there is no reference to the role played by Pakistan either in furthering Al-Qaeda objectives before the attacks, or in protecting bin Laden and the Taleban afterward.
Though frozen these past two years because of Washington’s need to foreclose on the weaknesses exposed by Sept. 11, Pakistan’s defense concerns remain unchanged: the acquisition of “strategic depth” in Afghanistan to counter the perceived threat from India. A military concept more relevant to cavalry tactics than to the nuclear war hanging over the sub-continent’s inhabitants, strategic depth implies guaranteeing a hinterland to where Pakistan’s military forces can retreat and re-deploy after a successful first-strike by India. After three bitter defeats in wars with India since independence, Pakistani strategists instinctively plan for the worst possible outcomes.
Though Pakistan is supporting the US and its efforts to nurture democracy in Afghanistan, its survival instincts dictate a drive toward a set of totally opposite objectives _ the withdrawal of American troops, the subversion of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government and the continuing fragmentation of a country that, unofficially, it considers little more than an arena for its own army exercises.
The recent upsurge in Taleban activities in southern and eastern Afghanistan confirms a view, widely held in diplomatic circles, that Pakistan is no longer willing to take a back seat in managing its neighbor’s affairs. Though the targets were Afghan soldiers and police, not their better-armed US allies, the attacks were characteristic of a planned military campaign, unlike earlier raids blamed on the Taleban or other groups hostile to the US. The fighting climaxed in a battle in Zabul province whose scale was not seen since the battle of Shah-e-Kot in March 2002, the last major deployment of the Afghan war. US jets pounded Taleban positions in Dai Chupan district for seven days, before the Taleban made an orderly retreat in the face of 1,000 US and 800 Afghan troops.
Pakistan has not declared its hand, blaming the fresh incursions on geography and the “porous” Afghan-Pakistani border. Nor has the US publicized its irritation, though the Pentagon, the CIA and the FBI regularly grumble at the lack of Pakistani cooperation in pursuing Taleban and Al-Qaeda members. But to the US and Afghan soldiers fighting the offensive, one thing must be obvious: that Washington’s reconciliation with Pakistan after Sept. 11 has paralleled, at the state level, the alliances of convenience the Pentagon made with Afghan warlords to spare American lives during the war against the Taleban.
Re-armed, enriched and made respectable by their efforts, Pakistan and the Afghan warlords now pose the most immediate threat to the US plan for Afghanistan _ and the man who crystallizes it, Hamid Karzai.
Michael Griffin is author of Reaping the Whirlwind: Afghanistan, Al Qa’ida and the Holy War, published in paperback by Pluto Press. This commentary was written for THE DAILY STAR
