Pakistan: A Hard Country (70 page)

For many years, the thoroughly pragmatic Islamism of the JUI and the equal y pragmatic nationalism of the ANP have helped ensure that the great majority of Pathans have lived peaceful y and not too unhappily within Pakistan. However, with both these parties now seriously discredited by their association with President Zardari and his al iance with the USA, the future of electoral politics in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa is now an open question.

11

The Pakistani Taleban

There arose one of those strange and formidable insurrections among the Pathans which from time to time sweep across the Frontier mountains like a forest fire, carrying all before them. As on previous occasions there followed a reaction, but the fire is not wholly put out. It continues to smoulder dully until a fresh wind blows.

(Olaf Caroe)1

As described in earlier chapters, the world of Sunni Islamist extremism in Pakistan embraces a range of different groups, with significantly different agendas. The sectarian extremists described have long been carrying out terrorist attacks against Pakistani Shia and Christians.

These and others in 2008 – 10 also turned to increasingly savage terrorist attacks in al iance with the Pakistani Taleban against state targets, ‘Sufi’ shrines and the general public, in response to growing military offensives in Bajaur, Swat and Waziristan. The terrorist threat from Islamist extremists is therefore now present across Pakistan. It wil almost certainly grow further, and may end by radical y changing the Pakistani state.

As of 2010, however, Islamist rebellion is not widespread. So far, mass insurrection has been restricted to parts of the Pathan areas of Pakistan, and has been due more to specific local factors and traditions than to wider Islamist and Pakistani ones. Among the Pathans, the Taleban can draw upon traditions of Islamist resistance to the Soviets, and long before that to the British; and indeed on a hostility, which dates back to time immemorial, to the rule of any state.

Just as the backbone of the Taleban and their al ies in both Afghanistan and Pakistan is to be found among the Pathans, so any settlement of the conflict with the Taleban in both countries wil have to be one which brings a majority of the Pathan population on board.

As explained in previous chapters, the deeper religious, ethnic and tribal roots of the Pakistani Taleban date back hundreds of years, and were revived by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the struggle against it. The upsurge of militancy among the Pakistani Pathans after 2001 was due overwhelmingly to the US invasion of Afghanistan, and the influence of the Afghan Taleban.

Contrary to a widespread belief, Pakistan was not responsible for the creation of the Taleban in Afghanistan. As recounted by Mul ah Abdul Salam Zaeef, a member of the core Taleban leadership, they had their origin in groups of madrasah students from Kandahar and surrounding provinces, who came together in the early 1980s to fight against the Soviet occupation and the Communist government. They were trained by the Pakistani military – but with arms supplied by the US. Men from these formations then gathered spontaneously in Kandahar province in 1994, in response to the dreadful anarchy which had gripped the region after the Mujahidin’s overthrow of the Afghan Communist regime in 1992.2

As of 1994, the Afghan group which was being supported by Pakistan was the radical Islamist and ethnic Pathan Hezb-e-Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, which the Taleban later defeated in their drive north to Kabul. By then, however, Hekmatyar had been at war for two years with other Mujahidin parties mainly representing the non-Pathan nationalities but, despite terrible bloodshed, had failed either to capture Kabul or to bring order to the Pathan areas. When the Taleban consolidated their authority in Kandahar, and protected Pakistani trade in the area, a section of the Pakistani security establishment led by the Interior Minister in the Bhutto government, General Nazeerul ah Babar, identified them as a force worth supporting.

There were a bizarre few months in 1994 and 1995 during which the Pakistani Intel igence Bureau (responsible to the Interior Minister) and the ISI (Inter-Services Intel igence, responsible to the military) were supporting the Taleban and Hekmatyar against each other; but by 1996 Pakistan was ful y committed to the Taleban, and Pakistani arms supplies, military advisers, training and Islamist volunteers played an important part in their subsequent victorious campaigns.

The Pakistani security services also encouraged some of their old Pathan al ies in the war against the Soviets to join the Taleban – notably the formidable Jalaluddin Haqqani and his clan along the Afghan border with Pakistani Waziristan, who continue as of 2010 to play a key part in fighting against Western forces and the Kabul government and to enjoy close ties to the Pakistani military. According to Western intel igence sources, the ISI encouraged and helped the Haqqani group to carry out a destructive attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul in July 2008. Nonetheless, as Mul ah Zaeef’s memoir also makes clear, the Taleban leadership never ful y trusted Pakistani governments and the Pakistani military, and since 2001 there has been in some Taleban circles active hatred of the Pakistani military because of the way in which they sided with the US after 9/11.

The reasons for the Pakistani security establishment’s support for the Taleban are not complicated, and as far as the high command are concerned stem from strategic calculations and not Islamist ideology (which is not to say of course that the strategy has been a wise one).

Lowerlevel operatives, however, engaged since the 1980s in helping the Afghan Islamist groups on the ground undoubtedly developed their own strong local al egiances.

The strategic root of support for the Taleban is witnessed by the fact that the initiator of the strategy, General Babar, was a minister in Benazir Bhutto’s PPP government, and that Pakistan’s approach continued unchanged under governments with very different attitudes to Islamism. Certainly General Musharraf, a convinced Westernizing modernizer, can by no stretch of the imagination be accused of ideological sympathy for the Taleban.

Musharraf, however, did for most of his career share in the basic reason for Pakistan’s Afghan strategy, which is fear of encirclement by India, and of India using Afghanistan as a base to support ethnic revolt within Pakistan. This fear is exaggerated, but is held with absolute conviction by almost al the Pakistani soldiers with whom I have spoken, and indeed by most of the population in northern Pakistan. In the words of Major-General Athar Abbas, head of military public relations in 2009 (and one of the most intel igent senior officers in the army):

We are concerned by an Indian over-involvement in Afghanistan. We see it as an encirclement move. What happens tomorrow if the American trainers are replaced by Indian trainers? The leadership in Afghanistan is completely dominated by an India-friendly Northern Al iance. The Northern Al iance’s affiliation with India makes us very uncomfortable because we see in it a future two-front war scenario.3

In consequence, Pakistani governments and military leaderships have believed that Pakistan must have a friendly government ruling in Kabul or, failing that, at least friendly forces control ing the Pathan areas of Afghanistan adjacent to the Pakistani border. This was necessary also because of the perceived threat that Kabul, backed by India, would return to the Afghan strategy of the 1950s, of supporting Pathan separatist revolt within Pakistan.

This fear has been kept alive by the support of the Kabul government and India – albeit very limited – for Baloch rebels in Pakistan; and by the Karzai administration’s refusal to recognize the ‘Durand Line’ between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Hence the absurd but passionately held belief among many Pakistanis that India is the principal force behind the Pakistani Taleban. In the 1990s there was also a belief among Pakistani strategists that Afghanistan could become a corridor for the expansion of Pakistani trade and influence in former Soviet Central Asia. Today, however, this hope is held only by Pakistani Islamists.

Despite the Taleban’s striking military successes, it was obvious to more intel igent Pakistani officials as early as 1998 that its Afghan strategy was going badly wrong. This was above al because of the entry on to the scene of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Forced to leave their former refuge in Sudan, they had returned to Afghanistan, where they had fought against the Soviets and Communists and forged close links with local Pathan Islamists.

Al Qaeda ingratiated themselves with the Taleban partly though ideological affinity (and the prestige which Arab origins have long possessed in this part of the world); partly through money; and partly because they came to serve as shock troops for the Taleban in their campaigns in northern Afghanistan, where many of their Pathan troops were unwil ing to fight.

On 7 August 1998 Al Qaeda carried out bomb attacks against the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, kil ing more than 200

people. In response, the Clinton administration ordered cruise missile attacks on Al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, passing across Pakistani territory. In the fol owing years, both the Nawaz Sharif and Musharraf governments asked the Taleban to expel Al Qaeda and seek better relations with the US. Pakistani officials whom I have interviewed have also claimed credit for the Taleban’s drastic reduction of heroin production in Afghanistan in 2000 – 2001, aimed at persuading the West to recognize the Taleban’s rule.

These Pakistani moves, however, were not backed by real pressure (for example by withdrawing Pakistani military assistance or restricting Afghanistan’s vital trade through Pakistan). The bankruptcy of Pakistan’s policy, and the greater influence of Al Qaeda, were drastical y revealed when in March 2001 the Taleban destroyed the great Buddhist statues at Bamian, despite a strong personal appeal by Musharraf.

Nonetheless, the Musharraf administration could stil see no alternative to Taleban rule in Afghanistan that would be favourable to Pakistan, and Pakistan was therefore stil linked to the Taleban when, on 11 September 2001, as a Pakistani general said to me, ‘the roof fel in on us’. Musharraf’s statement that US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage threatened to ‘bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age’ if Pakistan failed to cooperate in the US attack on Afghanistan seems to have been greatly exaggerated; but if the language was more diplomatic than that reported by Musharraf, the threat from the US to Pakistan in the immediate wake of 9/11 was undeniable.4 Given the mood in America and in the Bush administration at that time, hesitation by Pakistan would indeed have been very dangerous for the country.

With the agreement of the rest of the Pakistani High Command, Musharraf therefore agreed to help the US by establishing two US air bases in Pakistan to support the campaign against the Taleban in Afghanistan; supplying US forces in Afghanistan through Pakistan; arresting Al Qaeda members in Pakistan; and blocking Taleban forces from retreating from Afghanistan into Pakistan. The first two promises were substantial y kept, but the third only to a very limited extent.

Musharraf was apparently able to extract from Washington one major concession in Afghanistan: the evacuation by Pakistani aircraft of an unknown number of Pakistani military advisers and volunteers with the Taleban, trapped in the northern city of Kunduz by the advance of the Northern Al iance and in danger of being massacred. This made good sense, as such a development would have been hideously embarrassing to both Washington and Islamabad. Many of those Taleban fighters who surrendered to the Northern Al iance forces near Mazar-e-Sharif were indeed massacred, or herded into containers in the desert and baked to death.5 An unknown number of Taleban fighters were also evacuated by the Pakistanis from Kunduz.

Along the border with Afghanistan, the Pakistani army fought with and arrested some Arab and other foreign fighters trying to escape Afghanistan, but seem often to have turned a blind eye to Afghan and Pakistani fighters. It is not known how exactly Osama bin Laden, Aiman al Zawahiri and other Al Qaeda leaders were able to escape into Pakistan. If Pakistani troops were lax or complicit, so too were the Afghan troops which the West employed to capture Al Qaeda’s stronghold of Tora Bora on the Pakistan border in December 2001. In the end, there were simply not enough troops on either side of the Durand Line to control one of the most rugged frontiers in the world.

Musharraf was able for a while to sel his policy of helping the US in Afghanistan to the Pakistani establishment and people by his convincing argument that America would otherwise join with India to destroy Pakistan. In other words, it was a continuation of the general Pakistani view that India is Pakistan’s greatest chal enge. However, the al iance with the US over Afghanistan was never a popular strategy in Pakistan, and between 2002 and 2004 it was loaded with new elements which increasingly crippled Musharraf’s popularity and prestige.

Firstly, the US insisted that Pakistan extend its withdrawal of support for the Afghan Taleban to the Pakistan-backed groups fighting India – which have a much deeper place in the hearts of many Pakistanis and especial y Punjabis. Secondly, the US invasion of Iraq raised the already high level of hostility to America in the Pakistani population until it was among the highest in the Muslim world. Final y, the withdrawal of the Afghan Taleban from Afghanistan into the Pathan tribal areas of Pakistan, and the mobilization of Pakistani Pathans in support of them, led the US to demand that Pakistan launch what became in effect a civil war on its own soil.