Pakistan: A Hard Country (33 page)
Of course, the army has always gone into battle with the cry of Allahu Akbar (God is Great) – just as the old Prussian army carried Gott mit Uns (God with Us) on its helmets and standards; but, according to a moderate Islamist officer, Colonel (retired) Abdul Qayyum:
You shouldn’t use bits of Islam to raise military discipline, morale and so on. I’m sorry to say that this is the way it has always been used in the Pakistani army. It is our equivalent of rum – the generals use it to get their men to launch suicidal attacks. But there is no such thing as a powerful jihadi group within the army. Of course, there are many devoutly Muslim officers and jawans, but at heart the vast majority of the army are nationalists, and take whatever is useful from Islam to serve what they see as Pakistan’s interests. The Pakistani army has been a nationalist army with an Islamic look.21
However, if the army is not Islamist, its members can hardly avoid sharing in the bitter hostility to US policy of the overwhelming majority of the Pakistani population. Especial y dangerous as far as the feelings of the military are concerned has been the US ‘tilt towards India’, which associates the US closely with al the hostility, suspicion and fear felt by the soldiers towards India.
To judge by retired and serving officers of my acquaintance, this suspicion of America includes the genuine conviction that either the Bush administration or Israel was responsible for 9/11. Inevitably therefore, despite the bil ions of dol ars in military aid given by the Bush administration to Pakistan (which led to the army being portrayed not just by Islamists but by sections of the liberal media as ‘an army for hire’), there was deep opposition throughout the army after 2001 to US
pressure to crack down on the Afghan Taleban and their Pakistani sympathizers. ‘We are being ordered to launch a Pakistani civil war for the sake of America,’ an officer told me in 2002. ‘Why on earth should we? Why should we commit suicide for you?’
In 2007 – 8, this was beginning to cause serious problems of morale. The most dangerous single thing I heard during my visits to Pakistan in those years was that soldiers’ families in vil ages in the NWFP and the Potwar region were finding it increasingly difficult to find high-status brides for their sons serving in the military, because of the growing popular feeling that ‘the army are slaves of the Americans’, and ‘the soldiers are kil ing fel ow-Muslims on America’s orders’. Given the tremendous prestige and material advantages of military service in these regions, this was truly worrying.
By late 2009 the sheer number of soldiers kil ed by the Pakistani Taleban and their al ies and, stil more importantly, the increasingly murderous and indiscriminate Pakistani Taleban attacks on civilians, seem to have produced a change of mood in the areas of military recruitment. Nonetheless, if the Pakistani Taleban are increasingly unpopular, that does not make the US any more popular; and if the US
ever put Pakistani soldiers in a position where they felt that honour and patriotism required them to fight America, many would be very glad to do so.
INTER-SERVICES INTELLIGENCE, KASHMIR AND
THE MILITARY – JIHADI NEXUS
The issues of religious orientation and attitudes to the US obviously lead to the question of the military’s links to Islamist extremism, both inside and outside Pakistan. These links are obvious, but their origins have sometimes been misunderstood. The Islamists were initial y intended to be tools, not al ies; and the goal was not Islamist revolution as such, but to further Pakistan’s national interests (as perceived and defined by the Pakistani military and security establishment), above al when it came to attacking those of India.
A common definition of tragedy is that of a noble figure betrayed and destroyed by some inner flaw.22 The Pakistani military is in some ways an admirable institution, but it suffers from one tragic feature which has been with it from the beginning, which has defined its whole character and world view, which has done terrible damage to Pakistan and which could in some circumstances destroy Pakistan and its armed forces altogether.
This is the military’s obsession with India in general, and Kashmir in particular. Of course, Kashmir is by no means only a military obsession. It was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who once said that ‘Kashmir must be liberated if Pakistan is to have its ful meaning’, and Pakistani politicians share responsibility for encouraging ordinary Pakistanis to see jihad in Kashmir as legitimate.23 Nonetheless, both the military’s prestige and the personal experiences of its men have become especial y focused on Kashmir.
Speaking of the average Pakistani officer of today, General Naqvi told me:
He has no doubt in his mind that the adversary is India, and that the whole raison d’être of the army is to defend against India.
His image of Indians is of an anti-Pakistan, anti-Muslim, treacherous people. So he feels that he must be always ready to fight against India.24
Pakistan was born in horrendous bloodshed between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims; and, within two months of its birth, fighting had broken out with India over the fate of the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir.
This fighting has continued on and off ever since. Two out of Pakistan’s three wars with India have been fought over Kashmir, as have several smal er campaigns. These include the bitter, 25-year-long struggle for the Siachen Glacier (possibly the most strategical y pointless fight in the entire history of human conflict) initiated by India in 1984.
The vast majority of Pakistani soldiers have served in Kashmir at some point or other, and for many this service has influenced their world view. Kashmir therefore plays for Pakistan the role of an irredenta, and has joined a long historical list of such obsessions: like France with Alsace-Lorraine after 1871, Italy with Trieste after 1866, and Serbia with Bosnia after 1879. The last case, it may be remembered, led the Serbian military to sponsor terrorists who, by assassinating the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, sparked the First World War.25
Kashmir is not a specifical y military obsession. It is very widely shared in Punjab, and to a lesser extent in the NWFP and FATA, from which many volunteers for the Kashmir struggle have been drawn ever since 1947, but far less in Karachi, Sindh and Balochistan. This belief has been kept alive in part by the belief (which is true but – as in so many such cases – irrelevant) that democracy and the past resolutions of the UN are on Pakistan’s side; and by anger at Indian atrocities against Indian Muslims, both in Kashmir and more widely.
In both the Pakistani and the Indian militaries, the commitment to fight for Kashmir has been reinforced over the years by the sacrifices made there: some 13,000 dead on both sides in the wars of 1947 and 1965, together with around 1,000 dead in the Kargil battle of 1999, and some 2,400 (mostly from frostbite and accidents) in the twenty-five years of the struggle for the Siachen. That is without counting the thousands of civilian dead in 1947, and the 50,000 (according to Indian official figures) or more than 100,000 (according to Kashmiri groups) civilians, militants and Indian security personnel kil ed or missing in the Kashmiri insurgency which began in 1988.
Washington’s growing al iance with India since 2001, and abandonment of the previous US stance on the need for a plebiscite on Kashmir’s fate, has therefore caused intense anger in the Pakistani military. The military’s obsession with India and Kashmir is not in origin Islamist, but Pakistani Muslim nationalist. With rare exceptions, this has been true even of those senior officers most closely involved in backing Islamist extremist groups to fight against India, like former ISI chief Lt-General Hamid Gul.
Most have used the Islamists as weapons against India without sharing their ideology. Similarly, the deep hostility of men like Gul or former chief of staff General Aslam Beg to the US comes from anger at perceived US domination and subjugation of the Muslim world, not from radical Islam – a feeling to be found among many entirely secular and liberal figures in institutions such as Al Jazeera, for example.
That does not necessarily make their hostility to India any the less dangerous though. I had a rather hair-raising glimpse of the underlying attitudes of some ISI officers in 2008 when I asked a senior ISI public relations official (and seconded officer) to tel me who he thought were the most interesting analysts and think-tanks in Islamabad. He recommended that I see Syed Zaid Hamid, who runs an analytical centre cal ed ‘Brasstacks’ (after the huge Indian military exercise of 1987, seen in Pakistan as a prelude to Indian invasion).
Mr Hamid also presents a programme on national security issues on the News One television channel. He fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s with the Afghan Mujahidin, and, though he told me that he had never been an ISI officer, there can be no doubt that he was close to that organization. He described the ISI as ‘the intel ectual core and centre of gravity of the army. Without the ISI, the army is just an elephant without eyes and ears’ (this phrase caused extreme annoyance among some military friends to whom I repeated it).
Mr Hamid described himself to me as ‘a Pakistani neo-con’, and there real y is something neo-conservative about his mixture of considerable intel igence, great fluency in presenting his ideas and geopolitical fanaticism and recklessness. Like some neo-cons of my acquaintance in Washington, his favourite word seemed to be ‘ruthless’. Despite his background, he had a geekish air about him, and spoke with nervous intensity.
On the Taleban, he echoed the Pakistani security establishment in general (at least when they are speaking off the record), emphasizing the difference between the Pakistani Taleban, who were in revolt against Pakistan and had to be defeated, and the Afghan Taleban, who had never attacked Pakistan and were an essential strategic asset. However, he stressed repeatedly that he was a Pakistani nationalist, not an Islamist, and said that he himself would have far preferred to see Pakistan al ied to the late Panjshiri Tajik leader Ahmed Shah Masoud, ‘Afghanistan’s only liberal leader’.
On strategy towards India, his views were the fol owing: We say that if India tries to break up Pakistan by supporting insurgents like the Baloch nationalists then our response should be to break up India. In any case, we owe them payback for what they did to us in East Pakistan ... India is not nearly as strong as it looks. The faultlines of the Indian Federation are much deeper than those of Pakistan: Kashmir, the Naxalites, Khalistan, Nagaland, al kinds of conflicts between upper and lower castes, tribals, Hindus and other religions and so on. If we were to support these insurgencies, India would cease to exist.26
I hasten to add that, Kashmir aside, there is in fact no evidence that the ISI is supporting any of these insurgencies within India.
Nonetheless, this kind of attitude is deeply troubling, especial y because India’s growing problem with the Naxalite Maoist peasant rebel ion means that Mr Hamid’s words, while horribly dangerous, are not as stupid (seen from the perspective of an ultra-hardline Pakistani) as they might first appear.
To understand ISI attitudes, and Kashmir strategy in particular, it is necessary to understand that they saw victory over the Soviets in Afghanistan very much as their own victory. It became their central institutional myth. Because of the huge funds flowing from the US and Saudi Arabia to help the Mujahidin, which the ISI administered and used for its own purposes, the Afghan jihad of the 1980s was the key episode in giving the ISI an autonomous financial base and boosting ISI power within the military and the state as a whole.
The ISI became quite convinced that what they had done to the Soviets in Afghanistan they could do to India in Kashmir, using the same instruments – Islamist militants (the fundamental political and geopolitical mistakes involved in this belief should hardly need repeating). The spontaneous mass uprising of Kashmiri Muslims against Indian rule from 1988 on (initial y in protest against the rigged state elections of the previous year) seemed to give a great chance of success. However, to a much greater extent than in Afghanistan, these militants were to be recruited not just in the country concerned, but from within Pakistan (and to a lesser extent the wider Muslim world).
The ISI’s Kashmir strategy reflected the longstanding Pakistani strategy of promoting Kashmiri accession to Pakistan, and not Kashmiri independence. They therefore used pro-Pakistani Islamist groups to sideline the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, which initial y led the Kashmir uprising. This strategy included the murder by the ISI-backed Islamist militant groups of a considerable number of JKLF leaders and activists – even as these were also being targeted and kil ed by Indian security forces.
The Islamist radical groups, madrasahs and networks which had served to raise Pakistani volunteers for the Afghan jihad had always hated India, and were only too ready to accept Pakistani military help, including funding, weapons supplies, provision of intel igence, and the creation of training camps run by the Pakistani military.
However, just as in Afghanistan first the Mujahidin and then the Taleban escaped from the US and Pakistani scripts and ran amok on their own accounts, so the militants in Kashmir began to alienate much of the native Kashmiri population with their ruthlessness and ideological fanaticism; to splinter and splinter again into ever-smal er groups and fight with each other despite ISI efforts to promote cooperation, and to prey on Kashmiri civilians. Lashkar-e-Taiba’s greater discipline in this regard was reportedly one factor in the increasing favour shown to it by the ISI.