ASIAN AFFAIRS ON PAKISTAN

Ahmad Faruqui - Fellow at the American Institute of International Studies

In the spring of 1999, Pakistan’s army chief, General Pervez Musharraf, gained international notoriety by launching an armed assault on the town of Kargil in Indian Kashmir. He was widely condemned in western capitals for subsequently deposing the elected government of Prime Minister Nawaz Shariff.

However, his image was completely transformed in western eyes when he chose to make a U-turn in Pakistan’s policy of supporting the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan, in the aftermath of the tragic events of September 11.

This policy change brought him into considerable disrepute at home, where a large section of the population supported the Taliban and the majority opposed the US bombing of Afghanistan. At the same time, it earned plaudits from US President George W. Bush and a commitment of one billion dollars in economic aid. The sudden collapse of the Taliban in mid-November was followed by the triumphal entrance of the Northern Alliance into Kabul. This did not bode well for Pakistan, since the Northern Alliance viewed Pakistan as the sponsor of its mortal enemy, the Taliban. However, with the establishment of an interim administration in Kabul headed by a Pashtun, things appear to have stabilized.

But, on the eastern borders, things have taken a sudden turn for the worse. The suicide bombing attack of December 13 on the Indian Parliament House in New Delhi has given India a much-awaited pretext to strike at the terrorist training camps in Pakistan. Both countries are mobilizing their militaries and have moved short-range ballistic missiles near the border.

Historical Backdrop

Pakistan, created in August 1947 from the bloody vivisection of British India, itself underwent a bloody vivisection 25 years later, in December 1971. India invaded the eastern province of Pakistan, which accounted for about 55 percent of the population, in response to the migration of 10 million refugees into India. These refugees had fled the civil war in East Pakistan, which had resulted from the annulment of the results of the 1970 general election by General Yahya Khan, then Pakistan’s military ruler. Had these results not been annulled, a political leader from East Pakistan - Shaikh Mujibur Rehman - would have become head of government, for the second time in the nation’s history.

This was not acceptable to the major political leader from West Pakistan, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who conspired with elements of the Pakistani high command to declare Shaikh Mujib a traitor determined on separating East Pakistan from the federation. The Pakistani army cracked down on Shaikh Mujib’s political party, triggering a province wide revolt and civil war. After a lack luster campaign, the Pakistani army garrison of 45,000 soldiers, isolated from its home base in western Pakistan and fatigued with months of fighting an insurrection, surrendered to the Indian army on December 16, 1971 (1). Bangladesh was born. Pakistan, now simply reduced to the former West Pakistan, was no longer the world’s largest Muslim country.

India exploded a nuclear device in 1974, at an underground test site located less than a hundred miles of the border with Pakistan. While the test was ostensibly carried out to send a message to the Chinese, with whom India had fought a border war in 1962, and with whom relations continued to be less than sanguine, the significance of the nuclear explosion was not lost on Pakistan (2). Determined to never face the specter of military defeat at the hands of its much larger enemy, Pakistan applied itself diligently to developing a nuclear weapons program. In addition, it proceeded to acquire a domestic weapons production capability from China, and large numbers of obsolete Chinese tanks and fighter aircraft (3). The Pakistani army continued to grow in size, and 30 years later had grown to a size of 600,000, twice its 1971 size.

On the foreign policy front, Pakistan made a policy decision to acquire strategic depth by seeking closer ties with Afghanistan, located on Pakistan’s western border. That nation, despite having a Muslim population, had traditionally been close to India and the Soviet Union. The Soviet invasion of Kabul in December 1979 threw a spanner in the works. However, it did not take Pakistan long to decide to ally itself with the United States, in return for $3.2 billion in economic and military aid. Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), the equivalent of the US Central Intelligence Agency, began a covert war against the Soviets, by training, arming and funding guerilla fighters known as the mujahideen (fighters of the holy war). Smarting from its defeat in Vietnam, incurred indirectly at the hands of the Soviet Union, the US was anxious to give the Soviets a taste of the same medicine in the rugged mountains and desert plains of Afghanistan. This strategy paid off ten years later, when the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, humbled by the rag tag army of the mujahideen.

In the glow of victory, the ISI’s power and influence in Pakistan’s policy decision-making apparatus rose to unprecedented levels. It now turned its attention to wresting Indian Kashmir away from India. Kashmir was the unfinished business of partition in 1947. The Hindu ruler of this Muslim majority province had decided under unclear circumstances to accede to India. Pakistan had twice gone to war over Kashmir with India, once in 1947/48 and then again in 1965.

Both campaigns had begun as guerilla wars that grew into conventional wars, where India’s superiority in numbers and armaments resulted in a military stalemate. Having just won a war in Afghanistan without resorting to conventional forces, Pakistan sought this time to pursue a purely guerilla war strategy. Separatist groups in Indian Kashmir were seething with discontent, caused by years of political and economic neglect by New Delhi. Now armed with fighters from across the Line of Control that separates Pakistan Kashmir from Indian Kashmir, they launched a full-scale insurrection against the Indian government (4).

India responded by sending in large numbers of regular and paramilitary troops in order to quell the violence. Such a strategy had been successful in the Indian Punjab province, where the Sikh insurrection had been suppressed by military force, even though it ultimately led to the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. However, this strategy failed in Kashmir. Ten years later, the Indian army was still fighting the insurrection. Anywhere from 35,000 to 70,000 Kashmiris had died in this fighting, further intensifying the anti-Indian sentiment in the province.

Matters came to a head in the spring of 1999 when Pakistan stepped up the pace by launching a sizeable incursion into Kargil. Units of Pakistan’s Northern Light Infantry, assisted by several hundred mujahideen fighters, launched this incursion (5). After initial advances, this incursion was stopped and then thrown back by the Indian military. Under US pressure, Pakistan was forced to withdraw its forces and the resulting domestic humiliation caused the military coup that brought General Pervez Musharraf, the army chief into power (6).

In the meantime, events in Afghanistan had taken a disturbing turn of their own. After the Soviets withdrew, a power vacuum was created in Kabul, as the mujahideen commanders, an eclectic group drawn from the various ethnic groups of Afghanistan, could not come to a common understanding. There was much fighting and bloodshed throughout the land, and a civil war raged with no check or balance.

In 1992, a group of warriors known as the Northern Alliance came to power in Kabul (7). This group was comprised largely of the minority Uzbek and Tajik ethnic groups. Ethnic warfare, rape and pillage set in. The people of Afghanistan grew weary of the failure of the Northern Alliance to govern the country. Thus, when a group of Pashtun warriors, the Taliban, swept into Kabul in 1996, they were welcomed with open arms. This group, led by Mullah Omar, had evolved out of the religious seminaries in the southern city of Kandahar, across from the Pakistani province of Baluchistan.

The Taliban wanted to establish law and order in the country, by imposing a very strict interpretation of Islamic law (shariat). Their arrival was heralded— and perhaps even facilitated— by the ISI. The ISI expected the arrival of the Taliban to bring stability to war-torn Afghanistan, thus allowing the approximately three million Afghan refugees in Pakistan to return home. These refugees had settled in enclaves around Pakistan’s major cities, and become an economic drain on Pakistan. They were also a source of much trafficking in arms and narcotics, and had become a danger to Pakistan’s internal security. Pakistan hoped that the Taliban would be favorably disposed toward Pakistan in matters of foreign policy, since they shared their Pashtun identify with about 13% of Pakistan’s population.

Unfortunately, as the years went by, the Taliban began to impose a series of draconian restrictions on the human rights of the Afghan people, none of which were derived from Islamic law. Their well-known restrictions on women, that banned them from the workplace and from seeking education, and the requirement that men grew beards, were widely viewed as a distortion of Islamic precepts. Music and dancing, that had been a part of Afghan culture for centuries, were banned. The screening of movies in cinemas was stopped, and even watching television was made into a crime.

More ominously, in their zeal to establish a pan-Islamic community, they began to give refuge to a series of non-Afghan mujahideen who had fought against the Soviets, but who had now made the US their target. These foreign mujahideen included Chechens, Pakistanis, Kashmiris and Arabs. At some point, these fighters merged themselves into the al-Qaida organization led by a disgruntled ex-Saudi millionaire and businessman who would soon become a household name: Osama bin Laden. Pakistan, while fully aware of these developments, continued to support the Taliban and the mujahideen fighters.

Recent Events

After months of expressing distrust for General Musharraf, whom he viewed as the villain of Kargil, the Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee decided to take him up on his offer to meet “any time, anywhere” to discuss matters of bilateral significance. On July 15-16 2001, the two leaders met in the Indian town of Agra, carefully chosen as a symbol of India’s Muslim history. The summit did not have an explicit agenda, but there appear to have been many implicit agendas. The Pakistanis hoped that it would produce a resolution of the intractable Kashmir dispute. The Indians hoped that it would open trading opportunities between the two countries, and essentially freeze the Kashmir dispute. In the end, both sides would come out of the summit even further apart than they were at the beginning.

The summit gave Musharraf an ideal opportunity to elevate himself to the position of President of Pakistan, since that eliminated any diplomatic ambiguities about how he would deal with the Prime Minister of India. India was one of the first countries to recognize his accession to the presidency. The summit began with much fanfare as Musharraf visited the site of his ancestral home in New Delhi, which he had left as a child of four when his parents migrated to Pakistan. However, given the completely diagonal position of the two sides on Kashmir, the summit failed to resolve the impasse over Kashmir (8). It concluded without the issuance of even a brief diplomatic communiqué.

In the days following the summit, there was an acrimonious exchange between Islamabad and New Delhi, carried out through the media, in which both parties accused the other for the failure of the summit. Violence continued in Kashmir, causing concern to both sides. Eventually, they agreed to meet again, in Islamabad, at an unspecified date. An informal meeting between the two leaders was also expected to take place on the sidelines of the UN meetings in the fall.

The coordinated terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 resulted in the postponement of the UN meetings. The US government identified Osama bin Laden as a prime suspect in the attacks and asked the Taliban government of Afghanistan to hand him over, along with other leaders of the al-Qaida organization. It told all countries to chose sides: “either you are with us or you are with them.” As expected, the Taliban refused to hand over their guest. Later on, they asked for evidence of his guilt, and indicated that they would be willing to transfer him over to a third country. The US was not interested in negotiating anything with the Taliban. It asked Pakistan to join the coalition of forces that would lead a war against global terrorism, beginning with the Taliban.

Given Pakistan’s proximity to Afghanistan, its prior history of involvement in that country’s affairs, and the fact that the US forces could not bomb Taliban positions without flying through Pakistani airspace, the US gave Pakistan a list of 18 demands, and a very short time table in which to respond.

After a marathon session with his senior commanders and general staff officers, General Musharraf decided to accept all the US demands. In so doing, he made a fateful choice: Pakistan would turn against long-time ally Taliban, and allow the US to use military force to bring about the destruction of the Taliban. Musharraf was going to avail himself of the opportunity created by the tragic events of September 11 to get back in the good books of the world community by reducing the influence of the “jihadi” elements in Pakistani society. By so doing, he would position Pakistan to become the beneficiary of western largesse, in the form of economic and possibly military aid.

Almost instantly, Musharraf reinvented himself in Western eyes. A procession of dignitaries visited Islamabad in the space of a few weeks, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, and the foreign ministers of France and Turkey. From the US Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld visited Islamabad. Musharraf had come a long way from the situation in 2000, when US President Bill Clinton spent five hours in Islamabad, after having spent five days in India, and chose not to have any photograph taken with the General for fear of endorsing his military rule.

Historians will debate for many years whether Musharraf’s decision to cooperate with the US was carried out in the best interests of the country. On first glance, it does have much to recommend itself. Two specific elements are noteworthy. First, his decision to reduce the influence of the jihadi elements in Pakistani society and to eliminate support for the Taliban’s repressive policies makes eminent sense for a nation created in the name of Islam, but which has never got around to applying the positive and liberating precepts of that faith. Second, his decision to bring Pakistan out from more than a decade of international isolation, and to increase the opportunities for expanded trade with western countries, recognizes the realities of economic development and globalization.

On deeper analysis, however, Musharraf’s decision raises a host of troublesome issues.

For example, is the military going to lessen its involvement in domestic politics? Musharraf has indicated that he plans to abide by the Supreme Court decision, and hold national elections by October 2002. At the same time, he has declared his intention to continue as President for a five-year term, once appropriate legal changes have been made. Given the ease with which he was able to extend his tenure as the army chief, and thus postpone his retirement from the military, it is highly likely that he will continue as president for at least five years, and maybe longer. The tenuous nature of Pakistani society, made all the more insecure by events in neighboring Afghanistan, will provide him an enduring rationale for continuing as president under Kelsen’s “law of necessity” that has served well all prior military rulers (9).

Secondly, he does not seem inclined to make any major initiatives towards resolving the Kashmir problem with India. In fact, the very existence of this problem allows the Pakistani military to continue to rule the country, either directly or indirectly. Thus, it is likely that military spending will continue to absorb the lion’s share of government budget, after debt servicing.

Thirdly, any major overhaul of the military organization, to make it leaner, more efficient and more productive, is unlikely to occur. Several vested interests that are critical of Musharraf’s rule would be made worse off by any changes to the status quo.

Musharraf’s Decision Making Process

In the weeks that followed September 11, Pakistan, with the possible exception of the United Kingdom, did more than any country to help the US fight its war on global terrorism. To facilitate Operation "Enduring Freedom" it made available its entire air space (with the exception of a few no-fly zones), three air bases and logistic facilities. In addition, it agreed to provide detailed intelligence about the Taliban and the al-Qaida network to the US military, something that it uniquely possessed. The military government of Pakistan embarked on this course of action recognizing that hard-line elements within Pakistan were sympathetic to the Taliban, and that an aggressive military campaign against Afghanistan would result in civilian casualties among its Muslim population, triggering a popular backlash in Pakistan.

Apart from Jordan, none of the pro-Western Middle Eastern countries spoke up in favor of the Anglo-American bombardment of Afghanistan. None offered their air space, air bases or logistic support to the Anglo-American coalition force. In fact, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, a former air force pilot, openly ridiculed the theory that amateur pilots trained on small piston-engine aircraft in Florida could have carried out the attacks on America, by flying wide-bodied Boeing airliners into high-rise buildings at high speed. He questioned why the Anglo-American force is carrying out what are widely perceived to be revenge attacks against the people of Afghanistan.

The reticent government of Saudi Arabia lashed out at the US media and certain US politicians, for holding it accountable for the actions of Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida organization he heads. Notably Iran, despite its serious policy and ideological differences with the Taliban, which almost resulted in armed conflict between the two neighbors in the fall of 1998, condemned the Anglo-American bombing of Afghanistan (10).

Amidst all this doubt and unease in the Muslim world, Pakistan chose to openly side with the US. This unleashed seismic forces within the fault lines of Pakistan’s body politic. The visible protest marches every Friday in major Pakistani cities and towns may only have been carried out by fringe elements, but they were the tip of the iceberg. One week after the start of the bombing campaign, 83% of Pakistanis supported the Taliban in their war against the US according to a poll carried out by Gallup International (11). This is not to say that the majority of Pakistanis want a Taliban-style dispensation in their own country. Simply put, in their eyes, the US had gone from being a victim to being an aggressor. Images of children burned by napalm and thousands of impoverished refugees streaming across the border in thousands turned them against the US.

The position of the naive and misguided jihadis in Pakistan appears to have been strengthened by this war. In the Gallup survey cited earlier, only 12% of Pakistanis held Osama responsible for the events of September 11, and 82% regarded him as a mujahid. As veteran Pakistani columnist Ayaz Amir noted recently, “for the first time in Pakistan’s history the religious parties are reflecting public opinion while the so-called mainstream parties are content to waddle in the government’s shadow, dutifully chanting the mantra that Pakistan had no choice but to side with the United States (12).

Amir was not alone in expressing his opposition to the war in Afghanistan. Other Pakistani analysts such as Kaiser Bengali, Hossain Haqqani, Hasan-Askari Rizvi, and Ayesha Siddiqa-Agha were equally vocal in Pakistan’s traditionally pro-western English press. On the international scene, Indian author and political activist Arundathi Roy (13), Robert Fisk of the Independent newspaper in the UK, Eric Margolis of the Toronto Sun, and Noam Chomsky of MIT voiced their concerns about the hypocrisy of fighting terrorism with terrorism. Jerome Karabel, a sociology professor at the University of California, went one step further and stated that massive military action in Afghanistan, by creating civilian casualties in a Muslim country, would only ensure that the US will become bin Laden’s unwitting ally (14).

Pakistan’s Unstinted Co-operation

On September 19, 2001, Musharraf offered “unstinted cooperation” to the US in its war against terrorism. In a public address to the nation, he proffered five reasons for choosing this course of action:

- secure Pakistan’s strategic assets (15),

- safeguard the cause of Kashmir,

- prevent Pakistan from being declared a terrorist state,

- prevent an anti-Pakistani government from coming to power in Kabul,

- have Pakistan re-emerge politically as a responsible and dignified nation.

During the speech, which was given in Urdu, he chose to send a very strong signal to India to “lay off” Pakistan, during this time of crisis. He stated that India was trying to get Pakistan declared a terrorist state, and wanted to expand the scope of the war against global terrorism to include the militant camps in Pakistan Kashmir. As expected, Musharraf’s two-word rebuke to India, which was delivered in English, caused outrage in India. The next summit between the two countries, expected to be conducted on the sidelines of the UN meetings, was cancelled, and Vajpayee’s trip to Islamabad was postponed indefinitely. Musharraf could not have been more pleased with this turn of events, because he wanted to increase his anti-Indian profile in Pakistan, to counter his pro-US profile in the war in Afghanistan.

On September 30, 2001, in an interview with CNN, Musharraf ruled out the presence of any foreign troops on Pakistani soil. This was belied on October 20, when the US Rangers and the Delta Force launched an aborted mission from Baluchistan to capture Mullah Omar. The US proceeded to set up a command post at the air force base in Jacobabad, Sindh.

To imbue his radical shift in foreign policy with a high moral character, Musharraf said that all Muslim countries were on board on the issue of fighting international terrorism. Once again, he stated that domestic opposition to his policies in Pakistan was coming from a small group of extremists who represented a marginal and declining share of the population.

For several weeks, he continued to point out that “no deal” has been struck between Pakistan and the United States. However, he dropped many hints that policies that seek to ease Pakistan’s economic plight would be welcomed. Prior to arriving in New York for the UN meetings, he stated clearly that his purpose for visiting the US was to seek economic aid. He was also hoping that Pakistan’s aging and obsolete military hardware, which had fallen seriously behind the Indian military machine, would be refurbished and upgraded with US assistance.

During an interview with the New York Times, on the eve of his UN visit, he stated a desire to get the 28 F-16 fighter aircraft that Pakistan had purchased in the 1980s, and that are being held in storage in Arizona (16). And while ostensibly seeking not to tie the favorable resolution of the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan’s assistance to the US in the war on terrorism, he was hoping to use his newfound access to Washington and London to bring India to the negotiating table (17).

Musharraf sent his Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz to make the rounds at the world’s financial capitals, and to work with the multinational banks to get Pakistan’s debt rescheduled if not forgiven. He specifically asked for $2 billion in new economic aid and a lifting of economic sanctions.

How Did Pakistan Negotiate?

It is instructive to review how Pakistan played its cards during this time of crisis. The speed with which Musharraf complied with the US demands soon after September 11 belies the fundamental weakness of Pakistan’s negotiation position. Even prior to September 11, Yale’s Paul Kennedy had noted that Pakistan was a pivotal state in the region. This position was reinforced post September 11 since without Pakistan’s participation, the US could not have sent carrier-launched cruise missiles and fighter bombers into Afghanistan. Without Pakistan’s cooperation, it would have had little chance of finding al-Qaida bases and training camps.

US defense analyst Ehsan Ahrari had anticipated the powerful role that Pakistan could play in helping the US contain transnational terrorism. In an article published several months prior to September 11, he said presciently that General Musharraf’s military government would be interested in playing the role of an intermediary between the US and the Taliban, in helping track down Osama bin Laden. However, it would want a sizeable payoff, including the transfer of dual-use technology and the sale of military weapons (18).

In reality, Musharraf chose not to extract the full value of these Pakistani assets because he had other priorities. Anxious to legitimize his position as Pakistan’s president, and to safeguard the corporate interests of the Pakistani military (19) that could have been threatened in a US campaign against global terrorism, he acquiesced rapidly to all the demands that the US placed before him.

In so doing, he sent a very important signal to the US: you help me and I will help you. In the short term, this strategy worked. Almost instantaneously, he was transformed from being the usurper of Pakistani democracy and the villain of Kargil who was hell-bent on wresting Kashmir from India, into a strong ally of the free world who was a key partner in the fight against global terrorism.

However, policy makers in the US State Department knew that a major reason behind’s Pakistan’s 180-degree “rationalization” of its foreign policy was to pre-empt any Indian strike against Kashmiri-separatist camps located on the Pakistani side of the Line of Control (LoC). While stopping in Moscow prior to visiting the White House and speaking at the U.N., Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee had got President Putin to agree that all terrorists are bad, and there is no such thing as a good terrorist. This view was echoed verbatim by George W. Bush in his U.N. speech on November 10, 2001.

Vajpayee has embarked on a global mission to get camps on the Pakistani side of the LoC classified as terrorist bases that deserve global condemnation, in the hope that ultimately global use of force would be brought to bear on them. India has successfully raised the specter of Pakistani nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists such as Osama bin Laden. To prevent such a scenario from materializing, the US has indirectly let it be known that if Musharraf was removed from power, it would send in the elite troops of its 15th Marine Expeditionary unit to “neutralize” these weapons, even if that meant engaging with Pakistani troops.

This announcement caused grave consternation in Pakistan, a fact acknowledged by Musharraf in his interview with the New York Times. Pakistanis are proud of these assets, and even more proud of their ability to safeguard them. A fundamental weakness that eroded Pakistan’s negotiating position was that Musharraf kept on changing his tune.

On October 8, the day after the Anglo-American coalition began its bombing of suspected terrorist sites in Afghanistan, Musharraf spoke to a crowded press conference in Islamabad that was carried live on CNN. Dressed in a general’s uniform, he stated very clearly that the military campaign would be “sharp, targeted and short” and that he had been given assurances that it will not have any collateral damage. The very next day, US President George W. Bush flatly denied that Musharraf had been given any operational information about the campaign, and appeared visibly irritated at being second guessed by the general. Thus, when US Secretary of State General Colin Powell visited Islamabad on October 15, 2001, Musharraf committed Pakistan to staying with the coalition till the military objectives were met.

Acknowledging that there had been considerable collateral damage, he said that he grieved for the innocent victims in Afghanistan. But, consistent with Washington’s position, he placed the blame on the Taliban, for having jeopardized the interests of its own people. All hopes rested on the fighters of the Northern Alliance, who seemed unable to move for weeks on end. Musharraf blamed the campaign’s length on the lack of military intelligence about the whereabouts of Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden. But why should it have been otherwise?

In any guerilla war, the hardest thing to find is the enemy. In his October 8, 2001 press conference, Musharraf had made the campaign seem like a textbook case comprised of four easy steps:

- identify the targets,

- match them with the appropriate military weapons,

- deploy the forces and remove the targets and,

- move on to the “post-action” scenario.

The campaign floundered in its first phase because it could not identify the targets, the first step of the above sequence.

On November 6, 2001, the US general in charge of CENTCOM, Tommy Franks, declared that Osama bin Laden was not a target, even though his supreme commander had earlier said that Osama was “wanted, dead or alive.” One wonders how Musharraf, a veteran of two wars against India, a commando by training, intimately familiar with the details of Afghanistan’s military history, and a four-star general commanding an army of 600,000 troops, came to believe that the war would be over in four easy steps. As the campaign entered its second month, people throughout the Muslim world openly asked for a halt in bombing during the coming month of Ramadan.

To mollify these sentiments, Musharraf expressed his hope that the campaign would be stopped during Ramadan. However, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited Islamabad, Musharraf stated that the campaign could not be stopped till its (increasingly ambiguous) objectives were achieved. He also expressed his hopes that would happen before the beginning of the holy month of fasting and spiritual reflection. In Paris, he stated that continuation of the bombings during Ramadan would have a negative impact in the Muslim world, yet he choose to be silent on this topic during his meeting with Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street.

Selling Pakistan Short?

By showing an increasing aptitude for saying yes to every US demand, Musharraf sold Pakistan short. It is widely believed that the changes in the army high command, which resulted in the retirement of several pro-Taliban generals, including the head of the ISI and the Deputy Chief of the Army Staff, and the replacement of five out of nine corps commanders, were done to curry favor with the US Central Intelligence Agency. Musharraf said these changes in high command were not occasioned by any differences of opinion among the top brass, let alone by the opinions of any foreign power. He attributed them simply to the normal changes that flowed from his decision to extend his own tenure as army chief. The fact that he offered such a facile explanation shows that, like prior military rulers, he has become complacent about the critical faculties of his fellow Pakistanis.

Contrary to Musharraf’s assertions, the arrest of three nuclear scientists, suspected of having passed along nuclear secrets to Osama bin Laden, appears to have been done at the behest of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (20).

Finally, the “muzzle” that was placed on the Taliban’s ambassador in Islamabad, whereby he was forbidden from making unfavorable comments about a third country, seems to have been done to placate the US State Department which was getting increasingly concerned at the points he was scoring in the Pakistani media.

In the early sixties, speaking to both houses of the US Congress, Field Marshal Ayub Khan had declared proudly that Pakistan, which was the only country that belonged to both the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) and South East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) alliances, and also had two bilateral agreements with the United States, was America’s “most allied ally.”

Since 1954, it had received arms and munitions from the US, under the Military Assistance Program. These were used to equip five-and-a-half divisions of the Pakistani army with M-48 Patton tanks and a dozen squadrons of the Pakistani Air Force with F-104 supersonic interceptors, F-86 strike fighters, B-57 light bombers and T-33 jet trainers. The US based their U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance planes near Peshawar, for photographing key strategic airfields and industrial areas in the USSR, including a missile test center. On May 1, 1960, the Soviets shot down one of these planes at an altitude of 65,000 ft. over Siberia, triggering a major incident in the Cold War. Premier Khrushchev, saying Peshawar was marked with a red circle on Soviet maps, threatened Pakistan with retaliation.

Pakistan’s special status did not prevent the US from imposing an arms embargo on the Pakistani military, heavily dependent on the US for munitions and spares, during its do-or-die war with India in September 1965. Even more tellingly, Pakistan’s unflinching cooperation in the Soviet-Afghan war during the eighties was rewarded by invoking in October 1990 the Pressler Amendment to the US Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. This ended the supply of economic and military aid to Pakistan, which had averaged $650 million a year in the eighties.

As a consequence of the current war in Afghanistan, companies from the US and other countries have become extremely reluctant to do business with Pakistan. Pakistani exports, coming from a war zone, are down by a third. The Finance Minister estimates that the economy will take a hit of more than $2 billion in the near future. The textile sector, which accounts for more than 50 percent of Pakistan’s $10 billion annual exports and for 60 percent of the industrial workforce, has been especially hard hit. Just to redress these losses will take several billion dollars of new aid. Yet until recently, the only concrete action that had occurred was the rescheduling, not forgiveness, of $379 million of bilateral debt that Pakistan owes the US.

On November 10, 2001, with a supplicant Musharraf standing at his side during a press conference, George W. Bush offered a billion dollars in US aid to Pakistan. Measured in real purchasing power, this amount belongs in the same league as President Jimmy Carter’s offer of $400 million to Pakistan in 1980. Pakistan’s then president, General Zia, who observed famously that it was “peanuts”, rejected this offer. Carter’s package would be worth $800 million in today’s dollars. In 1981, President Reagan offered Pakistan $3.2 billion in aid to purchase a variety of armaments including 40 F-16 A and B strike fighters. That aid package, which would be worth $5.7 billion today, was accepted by Pakistan (21).

To pull Pakistan’s moribund economy out of its current slump will take a figure upwards of $10 billion. The economy, with a Gross Domestic Product of $65 billion, grew at 2.6% in fiscal 2000/01, less than the rate of population growth. The government has lowered the growth projection for fiscal 2001/02 down from 4 percent to 3.7 percent, while an independent foreign bank has lowered the forecast further to 2.5-3.1 percent (22).

More than a third of the population lives below the poverty line, defined by the World Bank as income of less than a dollar a day. Its external debts add up to $38 billion, and servicing the external and internal debt consumes more than half of the national budget. Its population of over 140 million includes three million Afghan refugees, many of whom are armed with Kalashnikov AK-47 rifles and grenade launchers and indulge in narcotics trafficking to sustain themselves.

As mentioned earlier, Pakistan has often gotten the “raw end of the deal” with the US during the past five decades, most notably at the end of the Afghan-Soviet war. Veteran US diplomat Dennis Kux’s opus on US-Pakistan relations is subtitled “Disenchanted Allies” for that reason (23).

While Deputy US Secretary of State Armitage characterized Pakistan’s prior US ties as being based on “a false premise", former US Ambassador Tereshita Schaffer, who now directs the South Asia program at Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, thinks that Pakistan and the United States have conflicting agendas in South Asia (24).

Both countries agree on the need for a stable Pakistan, but disagree on three major issues. The US wants to decrease violence in Kashmir, but Pakistan remains dedicated to pursuing its claims in Kashmir, which is likely to lead to continued violence. Pakistan wants to create a firewall between the antiterrorism campaign in Afghanistan and the freedom struggle of the separatists groups in Kashmir. Finally, Pakistan stands by its goal of installing a friendly government in Afghanistan, whereas for the US, stable leadership in Afghanistan is the key post-crisis objective. Brookings Senior Fellow Stephen Cohen recently mentioned a fourth factor on which there is complete divergence between the two countries: Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program (25).

On top of everything else comes Washington’s desire to develop a strategic relationship with India, a nation that Stephen Cohen has identified as an Emerging Power in his recent book. Much to Islamabad’s chagrin, the US Ambassador to India, Professor Blackwill of Harvard, has stated bluntly that the US policy on Kashmir stands unchanged. Moreover, high-level military contacts between the two countries have been renewed, and the US will soon be selling arms and munitions to India. These military ties flow from the need to manage a number of strategic developments in the region, including the US desire to contain China on its southern flank. In addition, India continues to be an increasingly important trading partner for the US, especially in the high tech IT sector.

The Transition in Kabul

After putting up a stiff resistance for several weeks, the Taliban regime collapsed during mid-November, in “one of the most remarkable reversals of fortune since Kitchener’s victory at Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898” (26).

US leaders had acknowledged before that the Taliban were tough warriors, and that it would take months (if not years) to dislodge them from power. The Taliban fighters first lost the strategic town of Mazar e Sharif to the Northern Alliance. Within a few days, they had fled the capital city of Kabul in the dead of night, without a shot being fired. The next day, the Northern Alliance triumphantly entered Kabul, clearly embarrassing President Bush who had asked them in the presence of General Musharraf on November 10, 2001 not to enter Kabul. Bush had made this request at the urging of Musharraf, who had warned that revenge killings and lootings would ensue in Kabul. Both leaders had wanted to put in place a representative government in Kabul, and declare it a de-militarized city.

Getting Bush to agree to this Pakistani request had been regarded as a major accomplishment on the part of Musharraf. However, since neither country had troops on the ground, they were unable to prevent the Northern Alliance from marching into Kabul once the Taliban had vacated it.

Musharraf had counted on having a broad-based government installed in Kabul, prior to the defeat of the Taliban. He was wary of the Northern Alliance taking over Kabul, given their bloody track record from the mid-nineties. The glue that holds the various factions together in the Northern Alliance is their common hatred of the Taliban and of Pakistan, who they view as the creator of the Taliban. Their strong ties with India and Russia were of significant concern to Musharraf.

A conference was held in Bonn to help design a broad-based government in Kabul that would stabilize the political situation, restore law and order, and help create an environment for holding elections. After several days of haggling, the various Afghan factions agreed to a diminished role for the Northern Alliance, and their leader stepped down in favor of a Pashtun who was indirectly supported by Pakistan, Hamid Karzai.

General Musharraf sent his greetings to Karzai on the day that he was sworn in as head of an interim government on December 22. Karzai reciprocated these sentiments, and agreed to visit Pakistan in the near future, allaying concerns that all had been lost on the western front. Nevertheless, Afghanistan’s new foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, who had earlier served as the Northern Alliance’s main media contact, lost no time in visiting New Delhi.

Pakistan continues to assist the US in its search for al-Qaida fighters who have escaped the bombings of Tora Bora. This support has been recognized several times by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and President Bush himself. The US is also helping Pakistan reschedule several billion dollars of its bilateral foreign debt, and assisting in the provision of new loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The economic situation appears to have bottomed out, and in response the value of the Pakistani Rupee has risen. Foreign exchange reserves are at their highest level in years.

The Threat from New Delhi

During the last week in December 2001, Pakistan mobilized its entire army of half a million soldiers, and positioned anti-aircraft guns and missiles in its major urban centres to ward off an Indian attack. Its air force began to carry out round-the-clock patrols in the air space above Islamabad, to prevent any pre-emptive strike against Pakistani nuclear assets. India deployed its short-range and medium-range ballistic missiles, cancelled all military leaves and requisitioned various forms of civilian transport to move its troops toward the border with Pakistan. A dangerous game of chicken began to be played out by these two neighbours who have fought three major wars and several minor wars since independence in 1947.

The triggering event was a terrorist attack on the Parliament Building in New Delhi on December 13. India charged that Pakistan was behind the attack and Pakistan alleged that India self-arranged the attack to place the blame on Pakistan and settle old scores. To independent observers, both accusations appeared equally irrational. What would Pakistan hope to gain by carrying out a terrorist attack in the Indian capital at a time when it is expecting several billion dollars in US assistance for its cooperation in fighting the war on terrorism? Why would India risk global condemnation by carrying out a self-arranged attack?

More than likely, stateless groups that have been fighting for an independent Muslim Republic of Kashmir since 1989 carried out the attack. These groups are concerned that Pakistan has abandoned them, just as it abandoned the Taliban in October.

Ironically, like the question of who murdered the Archiduke prior to the start of World War One, the question of who carried out the attack on the Indian Parliament has become irrelevant. Both India and Pakistan accuse the other of having carried it out, and seem to be getting ready to fight an all-out war. At some point, rhetoric and mobilization develop a logic of their own. Events are moving much faster than anticipated by any of the leading South Asian theorists. More importantly, they have been triggered by an incident far away from Kashmir.

Concerned primarily that a war with India would cause Pakistan to redeploy its forces away from the Afghan border, and stop searching for al-Qaida fighters, US Secretary of State Colin Powell began diligently working the phones since Christmas, urging both parties to de-escalate and use diplomatic channels to resolve their dispute. Indian External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh told him that under the present circumstances, India would not talk with Pakistan.

According to the conventional wisdom in Washington, no vital US interests are involved in South Asia. This premise needs to be reconsidered for several reasons. According to Yale historian Paul Kennedy, both India and Pakistan are pivotal countries, whose success or failure would have international ramifications. One fifth of humanity live in these two countries, producing goods and services valued at $500 billion. Both countries are located strategically near the oil fields and energy resources of the Middle East and Central Asia, and share a long border with China. A major war between India and Pakistan would arguably have a much bigger impact on world economic growth and political stability than a full-fledged war in the Middle East.

A full-fledged military conflict between these two neighbors would have a substantial probability of progressing into a nuclear war. Pakistan, being the smaller of the two countries, has indicated that it will use nuclear weapons if its survival is threatened in a conventional war.

This doctrine, similar to the French doctrine during the Cold War against the Soviet Union, recognizes the impossibility of prevailing against India in a conventional war. Pakistan has a highly trained army and an air force that ranks among the best in the world. However, Pakistani forces are numerically much smaller than India’s forces, and much of the Pakistani equipment is inferior to India’s.

While pledging not to be the first country that will use nuclear weapons, India has stated that a Pakistani nuclear attack on New Delhi will invite such massive Indian retaliation that “there will be no Pakistan,” according to retired Indian Air Commodore Jasjit Singh. In other words, India believes that “asymmetrically assured destruction” will prevent Pakistan’s first strike. Pakistan believes that “deterrence rests on ambiguity,” in the words of retired Lieutenant General Kamal Matinuddin. Unfortunately, ambiguity is a two-edged knife that can cut both ways. If the deterrence card is not played skillfully, it can invite a pre-emptive attack.

The two countries, while nominally speaking the same language, seem unable to communicate with each other. The Agra Summit between President Musharraf and Prime Minister Vajpayee failed in July because neither side was able to develop even a modicum of trust with the other. Given the disparity in sizes between the two countries, with India outnumbering Pakistan eight-to-one in population and four-to-one in military strength, a bilateral solution is not possible.

In the current crisis, neither side wants a war, but suspects the other will start one. Insecurity has historically triggered wars between nations. If war was to break out between India and Pakistan, both sides would engage in a “fight to the finish” knowing fully well that there could be no winners in such a conflict. Faced with such prospects, the US can no longer afford to take the low road to South Asia. The good news is that it is in a unique position to bring the two parties to a negotiating table.

As former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger notes in his recent book, "Does the US Need a Foreign Policy?", the US is the globally pre-eminent power in the cultural, economic, political and military spheres. For the first time in its history, India is allied with the US, which represents a significant shift in the non-aligned, pro-Soviet position it had maintained during the Cold War. India wants the US to support its desire to have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

The US is a major economic market for India, especially in its rapidly growing high-tech sector. Finally, India is keen to develop strong military ties with the US. Pakistan has changed its foreign policy toward Afghanistan to accommodate US concerns and is making a major commitment to stop all terrorist activities from being carried out on its soil. It is also keen to expand its economic ties with the US, and is counting on US economic assistance to pull its economy out of near-bankruptcy. Thus, the US is ideally positioned to exercise leverage with both countries.

Will the US take the high road in South Asia? Once the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, it lost all interest in that country. After several years of civil war, Afghanistan became a fertile breeding ground for terrorists. It took a horrible series of terrorist acts on US soil before the US changed its Afghan policy. One hopes it won’t take an even more horrible war in South Asia, triggered again by a terrorist act, to get the US to change its “hands off” policy in South Asia.

January 2002

Asian Affairs

Notes:

1.- Ahmad Faruqui, “Failure in Command: Lessons from Pakistan’s Indian Wars, 1947-99,” Defense Analysis, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 31-40, 2001.

2.- George Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation, University of California Press, 1999.

3.- Ahmad Faruqui, “The Complex Dynamics of Pakistan’s Relationship with China,” IPRI Journal, Summer 2001, pp. 1-17.

4.-For a concise discussion, see Sumit Ganguly, The Crisis in Kashmir: Portents of War, Hopes of Peace, Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1997.

5.- Brian Cloughley, A History of the Pakistan Army, Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 2001.

6.- For a critical analysis of Pakistan’s futile search for national security by relying entirely on its military dimension, see Ahmad Faruqui, “Pakistan’s Strategic Myopia,” RUSI Journal, April 2000, pp. 49-54.

7.- Excellent discussions of the Soviet-Afghan war and its aftermath are contained in Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin, The Bear Trap: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, Jang Publishers, Lahore, 1992 and Eric S. Margolis, War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet, Routledge, 2000.

8.- For a proposal on how to bridge these seemingly intractable differences between India and Pakistan on Kashmir, based on the Northern Ireland approach, and using economic incentives along the lines of the Camp David and Oslo Accords, see Ahmad Faruqui, “Beyond Strategic Myopia in South Asia,” Strategic Review, Winter 2001, pp 18-25.

9.- For a discussion of how Kelsen’s law of necessity has been invoked by Pakistan’s military rulers, see Allen McGrath, The Destruction of Pakistan’s Democracy, Oxford University Press, Karachi, 1996.

10.- As further evidence, the government-controlled Arab media are generally condemning the war. For example, an Egyptian editor, Samir Ragab, widely regarded as the voice of President Hosni Mubarak, asked recently whether there is “any difference between American’s bombing of innocent civilians in their homes and the callousness of Taliban’s mullahs?" Another writer, Salama Ahmed Salama, wrote that “America has resorted to brute force, heedless of the effects on the Afghans themselves as well as other Muslim peoples.” Cited in “Newspapers and TV Paint U.S. Action as a Kind of Terrorism” The New York Times, November 11, 2001.

11.- Cited in Newsweek: “Shifting Sympathies”

12.- “Afloat (barely) in a sea of shame,” Dawn, Karachi, November 2, 2001.

13.- See, for example, “The Algebra of Infinite Justice,” Outlook India, September 28, 2001.

14.- Jerome Karabel, “Becoming bin Laden’s unwitting ally,” Open Forum, San Francisco Chronicle, September 26, 2001.

15.- Ironically, Pakistan’s much-touted strategic assets had turned into a strategic liability whose protection could only be ensured by radically altering neighbourly allegiances.

16.- On November 11, 2001, US Secretary of State Colin Powell denied that there were any plans to transfer the F-16s to Pakistan, saying that Pakistan had already been repaid its original payment. Defense analysts question the military efficacy of such equipment that has been held in storage for two decades, and which no other nation has been willing to purchase, even at discounted prices.

17.- In the same program, Colin Powell said there were limits to how the US would facilitate a dialog between Islamabad and New Delhi. He specifically ruled out the US acting as a mediator or arbitrator or intermediary.

18.- M. Ehsan Ahrari, “Transnational Terrorism, Pakistan, and the U.S.” Strategic Review, Winter 2001, pp. 11-17.

19.- For a discussion of how the Pakistani military always moves to protect its corporate interests, see Hasan-Askari Rizvi, Military, State and Society in Pakistan, St. Martin’s Press, 2001.

20.- The list includes Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, one of the country’s most decorated nuclear experts. See “Pakistan Moves Nuclear Weapons” Washington Post, November 11, 2001.

21.- US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Consumer Price Index”

22.- “Pakistan’s economy: Bombarded,” The Economist, November 17, 2001 and “Afghan crisis sparks Pak GDP target cut” The News, Lahore, November 16, 2001.

23.- Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947-2000: Disenchanted Allies, John Hopkins University Press, 2001.

24.- “The US and South Asia: New Priorities, Familiar Interests,” South Asia Monitor, Number 38, October 1, 2001.

25.- Brookings Briefing, “Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Visit to the US,” November 6, 2001.

26.- John Keegan, “Taliban’s arrogance key part of collapse,” Daily Telegraph, November 15, 2001.

Asian Affairs