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Sol Sanders Archive
Wednesday, July 2, 2008

The Pakistan crisis deepens – with Washington’s assistance

One learns early in life – or should – that it is never correct to say that “things couldn’t get worse”. They always can. And with dysfunctional Third World regimes [yes the appellation still applies for lack of a better one!] that is certainly often the case.

But it is nevertheless tempting to say that about the current situation in Pakistan.

Also In This Edition

The country is beset with a growing internal Islamicist terrorist movement that is a threat to its long time formal dedication to a secularized society. That builds on the contradiction since its founding ethos was as a homeland for British Indian Muslims. Its immediate neighbors are threatened by the terrorists — e.g., possible contagion for India’s own Muslim perhaps larger than Pakistan’s 166 million. But the threat of Pakistan’s implosion or splintering would redound on the Indian Union itself.

Furthermore, Pakistani fanaticism threatens with the long arm of decades of heavy immigration to the United Kingdom and other parts of the West as well as in the Persian Gulf states with their hundreds of thousands of South Indian labor.

And, perhaps more important than all, U.S.Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen told a group of American military writers in early June after a visit to Pakistan that "I believe fundamentally if the United States is going to get hit [again such as 9/11], it's going to come out of the planning that the leadership in the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas] is generating…” in the area fronting Afghanistan.

Long years of bad governance, corruption and neglect of economic development – as vast sums were diverted to the cost of a gigantic [given the size of the country and its poverty] military machine – have set the stage for poverty, ignorance and fanaticism among a swelling population. Whatever other pretexts, the military and the focus of the government since it is the only national functioning institution in the country, always gives highest priority to its fragile relations with a larger and more powerful India. That friction has already descended into armed conflict three and a half times during the half century of both states’ independence. Relations are for the moment better but always subject to unexpected incidents of violence on the [heavily militarized] Line of Control in Kashmir and in terrorist acts constantly taking place in both countries.

If that were not enough, Pakistan suffers from the tender mercies of its two allies – the well-meaning, generous [$11 billion in aid in the past six years, non-military aid current running at $400 million annually] if bumbling Americans, and the crafty, amoral Chinese. The focus in Washington has shifted – after a period of malignant neglect after the Soviet implosion of 1990 – from an alliance against Soviet imperialism in The Cold War to an alliance against Islamofascism since 9/11.

Beijing has always had a simpler concern: my enemy’s enemy is my friend. For whatever the current relatively good state of Indian-Chinese relations – China has moved into first place among India’s trading partners – Islamabad’s enmity for India is what attracts Beijing’s interest. With the construction by China of a second major Pakistan oceangoing port at the entrance to the Persian Gulf on the Iranian border, Beijing is obviously hoping the strategic depth Gwadar gives the Pakistan navy against India would come in handy as it implements its own Blue Water ambitions into the Indian Ocean.

In the post-9/11 crisis, tough U.S. talk forced Pakistan’s President Gen. Pervez Musharraf to choose Washington in President George W. Bush’s dictum of “you are either with us or against us”. The choice was stark: drop Pakistan’s sponsorship of the Taliban Regime in neighboring Afghanistan and work to round up Osama’s gang, or face the full wrath of the U.S.

Musharraf made the choice quickly and switched. He collaborated with the Americans in swiftly overturning of the Taliban regime in Kabul. And he went after his own “true believers” in Pakistan’s somewhat notorious intelligence operations who had backed the Taliban regime and did not want to pursue the U.S.’ war on terrorism. They let themselves be heard in what were at least three publicly acknowledged attempts to assassinate the Pakistani leader, two, significantly, within earshot of the general headquarters of the military in the Rawalpindi Cantonement.

And it must be remembered that most of the captured high value Al Qaeda operatives have been with Pakistani collaboration, even if the leader himself has managed to elude the Americans. If some of the battlefield prisoners fingered by the Pakistanis lingering at Guatanamo have turned out to be innocents caught in the cat’s cradle of the region’s loyalties, it is also true that some 50 released prisoners have been identified, captured, or killed when they returned to the battlefield in Afghanistan.

But what has followed on has been a caricature of Washington foreign policy failures in past years. The Pakistan-U.S. relationship recalls the assistance in undermining of the Shah of Iran or the murder of President Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam at the hands of a U.S sponsored coup which led to the victory of an enemy.

Washington, not content to try to slowly modify the Musharraf military regime’s grip, started a campaign to return the country to “democracy”. It ignored the fact that Pakistan had the freest media it probably ever has had including widespread electronic coverage critical of the regime. Party government, in its corrupt fashion, was operating in the state assemblies and Musharraf had finagled or bought a majority in the national showpiece legislature. The “restoration” Washington called for was of incredibly corrupt, feudal, civilians – whom Musharraf had overthrown, as had army leaders before him had to do when their administrations failed completely. [Half Pakistan’s history has been under military rule.]

A vast gaggle of U.S. officials – including a loose tongued commander of the U.S. Central Command who had to be removed because he talked too much – loudly paraded through Islamabad giving substance to one of the main appeals of the Islamicists, i.e., that Pakistan was returning to colonial dictation from the U.S. A gullible American media bought into the fiction of a reformist Pakistani judiciary [whom Musharraf had decapitated as had happened before him]. The recent “Long March” demonstration – an interesting choice of titles – of Pakistani lawyers ended with a physical assault on judges. Washington think tanks who had no experience or background in the affairs of the Subcontinent nevertheless offered “solutions” through hired Pakistani hit men.

Washington forced a “shotgun marriage” with former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on Musharraf and a return of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, surrogate in Pakistan of the Saudis. Through him they had continued Wahabi Islamist extremist evangelism in a country with a once solid British Indian secular tradition. [Now the courts have ruled Nawaz Sharif cannot stand for election to the parliament because of unresolved corruption accusations.]

That “civilianization” effort has succeeded, at least in part. But the catastrophe when Bhutto was assassinated [in part through her own insistence in flaunting security] exacerbated the crisis. Behind her stood her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, the man the whole country had called “Mr. 10 percent”, the most notoriously corrupt official the country had ever known in a rogues’ roster that is all too extensive.

Now, the civilian government is near paralysis.

The two principal political leaders, Zardari and Nawaz Sharif, are at each other’s throats. They have tried to unite to oust Musharraf. But he has played them against one another, and the military – the only national institution in the country which functions – remains, apparently, loyal to its command structure based largely on seniority.

What now is bringing the crisis to a boiling point is Pakistan’s troubled border area with Afghanistan and the growing role it is playing in the war on terror in Afghanistan and worldwide.

Basically, the problem of governing the region is one inherited and never resolved by British India. Primitive tribal societies divided by an arbitrary border in some of the world’s most inaccessible terrain have always harassed their more peaceful neighbors in the plains. And they have been used in the power games – from Tsarist-Soviet efforts to reach the Indian Ocean to British Imperial efforts to block them and expand into Central Asia to the nationalist/anticolonial movements of all ethnicities and ideologies.

The strands of all those former conflicts feed into the present chaos. What’s been added is the element of Osama Ben Ladin’s Islamofascism, a highly professional international call using modern communications for the return to a nonexistent paradisiacal model of an Islamic religiously oriented state. His henchmen’s tactics are exploiting the framework of the American and Saudi-assisted successful resistance which led to the Soviets’ final disaster in Afghanistan. It was from that sanctuary that Osama executed his 9/11 attacks. And his adherents obviously hope to repeat their earlier performance by again capturing strongholds in Afghanistan or repeating their successes against the Soviets with the Americans and NATO.

Osama’s continued presence in the area – whether real or mythical – has fed on the traditional xenophobia, a resurgence of the radical Islamicists whom the Pakistanis had helped install in the vaccum left by the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan. Foreign recruits still flock to the area, now to join in the holy war against the Americans and the regime of Pres. Hamid Karzai and its U.S. and NATO supporting forces.

Frontiers which existed largely in the minds of mapmakers are breached by the Islamicists on an almost daily basis with coordination between U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan and the Pakistani military at a minimal. Restrictions on the use of inferior numbers of NATO troops, Indian intrigue with the Karzai regime against Pakistan, and the ethnic divides among the Afghans themselves are part of the witches brew.

The local 80,000-man Pakistan militia – which along with bribery and an occasional swat across the mouth was the old British Indian way of dealing with the tribals inherited by the Pakistanis – has been infiltrated. [This was dramatized when an American officer was publicly assassinated by them last year during a negotiation].

In the constant melee there are episodes of “friendly fire” and “collateral damage” [the inevitable unintended civilian casualties] as American forces hunt the Islamicists in hot pursuit across the international frontier. This action intensifies the strongest appeal of the Islamicists, agitation against “foreign” intervention in the tribal areas – whether it be American, Afghan or Pakistani. Add to that the regular Pakistani military’s lack of expertise in “counterinsurgency”. They are trained for the set-piece battles on the Punjab plain with India — although Islamabad has instigated and trained the same tribals against what has become New Delhi’s military occupation of the disputed state of Kashmir lying betwixt India, Pakistan, and China’s Occupied Tibet.

Were all this not enough, the denizens of the Clinton Administration at the U.S. State Department had a moment of inspired if totally misguided enlightenment. They decided that contrary to the infinite and often selfdefeating complications of trying to maintain a policy toward the Subcontinent which recognized the Indian-Pakistan confrontation as fundamental, they would simply cut the Gordian Knot: they would treat each on a bilateral basis.

The Bush Administrations with the help of what passes for diplomatic professionalism at State has blithely tried to imitate this strategy.

That meant, for example, overthrowing nonproliferation dogma vis-a-vis India [at a time when one of the chief aims of the Administration was to curb a proliferation in North Korea and Iran]. With India moving rapidly toward disassembling its 35-year-old Soviet-style planning for economic liberalization and a skyrocketing trade with the U.S. – not excluding billions in offshore information technology – Washington suddenly offered New Delhi open sesame to American nuclear technology and other high tech formerly denied a Soviet ally. Past transgressions [secretly building nuclear weapons and refusing to sign the non-proliferation treaties] were to be forgiven.

But it couldn’t be done with Pakistan, the argument went, which requested it. There was the still not entirely resolved operations of the A.G. Khan network which peddled stolen nuclear technology, borrowed Chinese and North Korean tech, to pariah states. Khan presented a problem for Musharraf as well as the U.S., not only for his possible connections to former military and civilian leaders, but because he had been ballyhooed as “the father of the Islamic bomb” in Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. [That was despite the fact that Washington has chosen to ignore the fact that it has sanctioned Indian companies for passing nuclear secrets to Tehran.]

Now the Indian government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh – with the widowed Sonia Gandhi driving from the back seat as leader of the Congress Party – faces the choice of pushing through this important economic initiative against his coalition’s Communist supporters, or defying them and going to elections over this and other issues. That is a Hobson’s choice. With its main opponent – once enthusiastically for an American alliance but recently opposing the U.S. agreement – the Bharat Janata Party winning crucial state elections one after the other, Singh, a career economist, may have to drop this keystone in his program

Meanwhile, Pakistan has gone to Beijing for promised assistance on what pretends to be an expanded peaceful nuclear energy program even though China, itself, is calling on Japanese and American companies for a dramatic boost to its own nuclear electricity generating capacity. That ties in to Chinese sales to Pakistan of a replicas of Soviet fighter planes and the promise of a small fleet of missile-carrying sloops as well as an array of other arms – including North Korean missile technology in part a loan from Beijing and the Soviets over the years.

All of this feeds into the long standing propaganda line that China is Pakistan’s “all weather ally” having not abandoned it after the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan as Washington is alleged to have done. And there is the lingering suspicion in Pakistan that if and when the Osama Bin Laden problem is “solved”, Washington again will abandon the alliance.

Where to now?

Although the civilian politicians and media calls for Musharraf’s ouster continue, there are no public signs of the military abandoning their former commander –although there is speculation of Islamaicst infiltration at lower levels. Musharraf was forced to take off his military cap to retain the presidency. But, in fact, recent publicity of a meeting of Musharraf with Chief of the Army Staff Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani was a renewed call for combating terrorism and extremism with “full force and all available resources”. It was the first publicly announced encounter between the President and Kayani since the escalation of recent border episodes. Kayani is regarded as the quintessential nonpolitical Rajput warrior, and the meeting and announcement was apparently a gesture of unity of the armed forces behind the President. And that seems to have been echoed in a statement by Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gillani, seen as a transition caretaker, backing away from is earlier softer approach to the “militants” in the frontier area.

At the end of June, the military began two new offensives – one in the Khyber Pass area where logistics for U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan from the Pakistan ports have been intercepted by the Islamicists. The Pakistan army has also launched an offensive with regular troops in the area around Quetta, closing off exits to Afghanistan, where there has been a recent increase in guerrilla activity.

Perhaps even more significant, Baitullah Mehsud, an Islamicist leader who once threatened to take over control of large parts of non-tribal northwest Pakistan said he was suspending peace talks with the government. Mehsud is widely believed to have involved in the assassination of Bhutto.

Whatever the success or failure of these new operations as manifestations of Pakistan resolve, it is clear that the new U.S. Central Command head, Gen. David Petraeus, has his work cut out for him. One can only hope that the improved situation in Iraq permits him – with the direct line he has to the White House – to lead the way toward more coordinated [and quiet] American tactics in an incredibly complex and difficult situation.


Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.

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