Pakistan: A Hard Country (71 page)

While Pakistan was beginning to create one enemy for itself in the Pathan areas on Washington’s orders, it was also more and more being required to suppress the anti-Indian militants which it had backed since 1988. Washington’s insistence that Pakistan extend its opposition to Islamist militancy to Pakistan-backed groups in Kashmir and India was inevitable, given the general terms in which the Bush administration framed the ‘Global War on Terror’.

American pressure was greatly accelerated by the actions of the terrorists themselves. On 13 December 2001, terrorists linked to the Pakistan-based groups Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed launched a suicide attack on the Indian parliament. In response, India massed troops along the border with Pakistan. Under intense pressure from Washington, in January 2002 Musharraf banned these two groups, and in a major new departure declared that Pakistan was opposed not just to the Taleban and Al Qaeda but to Islamist militancy in general.

He promised India and the US that his administration would prevent further terrorism against India from Pakistani soil, but also demanded that India and the international community move to solve the Kashmir issue, which ‘runs in our blood’. 6 The Musharraf administration did move effectively to stop militants crossing into the province from Pakistan, and the fol owing year declared a ceasefire along the Line of Control. Musharraf wound up a number of militant training camps, and declared an official ban on Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed and other groups. In practice, however, these groups remained in existence under other names. Lashkar-e-Taiba’s parent organization, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, retained and expanded its large network of schools and

charitable

organizations,

and

in

2005,

with

military

encouragement, played a leading part in helping the victims of the terrible Kashmir earthquake. After 2002 the Pakistan government’s moves against the militants did lead to a drastic reduction in violence within Indian Kashmir, and a limited warming in Indo-Pakistan relations.

Musharraf himself stated his administration’s approach as fol ows: Al Qaeda has to be defeated militarily, period. They are foreigners who have no right to be in Pakistan. With the militant Taleban, it is more complicated. They are local people who are not so easily recognized, and they have local roots. So we have to deal with them militarily when necessary, but we also need to wean the population away from them by political means and through social and economic development, and negotiate so as to draw away more moderate elements. This is not an easy job.

We may be double-crossed. We may fail. But we have no choice but to pursue this course because we cannot use military means against the whole population ... After al , previously I was the only one saying about Afghanistan too that the West needed a political strategy there to wean away some parts of the Taleban from the terrorists. Now Western leaders also accept this.7

In the wake of 9/11, Musharraf’s administration did therefore take strong action against Al Qaeda operatives in the heartland of Pakistan, arresting hundreds, including some of the group’s leaders, together with Pakistani sympathizers. This was later to help destroy Musharraf’s administration, when the Supreme Court demanded an account of what had happened to some of these ‘disappeared’ people (the general assumption in Pakistan being that many had been il egal y handed over to the US and were being held at US bases in Afghanistan).

For almost three years the Musharraf government avoided taking strong action against Al Qaeda and the Taleban in Pakistan’s tribal areas along the Afghan border. One reason was the strategic calculation of the Pakistani security establishment concerning future Pakistani influence in Afghanistan. The view of important parts of the army and the political establishment is that a Taleban-ruled Afghanistan, though problematic in many ways, would stil be vastly preferable to one dominated by Afghanistan’s non-Pathan nationalities, in al iance with India.

On the other hand, such an outcome is in the view of the Pakistani establishment clearly not worth risking the existence of Pakistan by provoking a US attack on Pakistan; so while the leadership of the Afghan Taleban has enjoyed a measure of shelter in Pakistan (especial y in northern Balochistan and the city of Quetta, where several of them are credibly reported to be based), Pakistan has not actually supported the Afghan Taleban, in the way that Pakistan, the US, Britain, Saudi Arabia and other countries supported the Afghan Mujahidin against the Soviets. This is obvious from the Taleban’s lack of sophisticated weaponry and training. Indeed, even in June 2010, according to a briefing by the British military which I attended, they were stil far behind the Iraqi insurgents even in the construction of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).

This evidence strongly contradicts a report of Matt Waldman of June 2010 al eging close Pakistani military assistance at the highest level to the Afghan Taleban (a report based on exclusively Afghan sources and containing some highly improbable anecdotes, including a personal meeting between President Zardari and Taleban leaders in which he pledged Pakistani support). It should also be a reminder of how much more the Pakistani military could do to help the Afghan Taleban (and other anti-Western groups) if the relationship between Pakistan and the US were to col apse completely.8

The Musharraf administration adopted a strategy of trying to placate the Americans by encouraging local tribesmen to drive out foreign Islamist fighters aligned with Al Qaeda (Arabs, Uzbeks, Chechens and others), while leaving fel ow-Afghan Pathans alone. In mid-2004 the administration changed this strategy somewhat, partly in response to assassination attempts against Musharraf which were traced to militants in Waziristan; but much more importantly because the Afghan Taleban, using Pakistani territory as a base, had begun their successful counter-offensive against the US and its al ies in Afghanistan. The Taleban were enormously helped in this by the diversion of US military effort to the war in Iraq, and by the failure to create a working administration in Afghanistan. Pakistan therefore came under intense growing US pressure to launch an offensive in its tribal areas, and especial y in Waziristan, the heart of Taleban support.

Musharraf was accused by the US media and members of Congress of ‘double-dealing’, and the longstanding links between the Pakistan army and the Taleban were repeatedly brought up for discussion.

This much is obvious. A much more difficult question is how far, and how many, ISI operatives on the ground actively sympathize with and help the Taleban and other militant groups. Indeed, this question would be impossible to answer without access to the top-secret files of Pakistani Military Intel igence (MI – not to be confused with the ISI), which monitors internal discipline in the armed forces. Some of them must have such sympathies, given the public attitudes of retired senior officers such as former ISI chief Hamid Gul, and a number of retired lower-ranking officers with whom I have spoken.

This personal closeness of parts of the military to some of the Islamists

stemmed

from

three

campaigns:

the

Zia-ul-Haq

administration’s sponsorship of the Pathan Islamist Mujahidin groups who fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan after 1979; the Pakistani military’s mobilization of Islamist radical groups to fight against the Indians in Kashmir after 1988; and the belated decision of the government of Benazir Bhutto in 1994 to back the Afghan Taleban in their campaign to conquer Afghanistan and create Islamic order there.

On the other hand, Musharraf made a determined effort to weed out radical Islamists from the senior ranks of the army and ISI, and there is no evidence whatsoever that his successor as Chief of Staff, General Ashfaq Kayani, has any Islamist sympathies. On the contrary, the heavy fighting with the Pakistani Taleban which broke out in 2007 and intensified in 2009 has, I am told, led to stil further vigilance against possible Taleban sympathizers in the officer corps. ‘After al , we are not suicidal idiots,’ an officer told me.

The real y important difficulty with Pakistani military attitudes to the Taleban from 2001 – 10, it seems to me, goes deeper. It stems from the fact that, while the Pakistani military is deliberately shaped so as to make its members – of al ranks – feel a caste apart, they are stil in the end recruited from Pakistani society. They have parents, grandparents, siblings, in-laws. They go back to live with them on leave. Most of Pakistani society – especial y in those areas of northern Punjab and the NWFP from which the rank and file of the army are recruited – is not Islamist. That is obvious from the election results.

What it is, is bitterly anti-American, for reasons set out in earlier chapters. This anti-American feeling did not lead most of the population, even in the Pathan areas, to support the Pakistani Taleban, and terrorism and Islamist revolution within Pakistan. It did, however, contribute to overwhelming – indeed, in many Pathan areas, universal – sympathy for the Afghan Taleban in their struggle against the US presence in Afghanistan.

THE RISE OF THE PAKISTANI TALEBAN

An additional factor in delaying Pakistani military intervention in FATA was that, with very brief exceptions, neither the Pakistani military nor the ful authority of the Pakistani government had ever been extended to the tribal areas. Pakistan had continued the indirect British form of rule there, but, remembering the repeated bloody campaigns that the British had had to launch in the region, in 1947 withdrew most regular Pakistani troops from FATA. The Pakistani military move into Waziristan in 2004 was therefore not exactly the restoration of Pakistani authority in the region, but in some ways represented something radical y new.

There was a widespread fear in the military that to invade FATA (which is what it amounted to) might be a military and political debacle; and one can believe this version, because a debacle was what it turned out to be. Remembering the repeated tribal revolts against the British military presence in the region, Pakistan had always kept a light military presence there, relying on the Pathan-recruited Frontier Corps rather than regular soldiers. Waziristan in particular has long been famous for armed defiance. A British report of 1901 declared of the Waziris that: ‘From the early days of our rule in the Punjab, few tribes on the frontier have given greater or more continuous trouble, and none have been more daring or more persistent in disturbing the peace of British territory.’9

When in March 2004 the Pakistani army moved into south Waziristan to attack the Afghan Taleban and Pakistani militants, the result was a revolt of local tribesmen under the leadership of radical local mul ahs. In fierce battles, several vil ages were destroyed and hundreds of local people kil ed, including women and children. The army too suffered hundreds of casualties; and, most worryingly of al , there were instances of units refusing to fight. Several officers were reportedly dismissed from the military as a result. Meanwhile the army’s assumption of political responsibility for an area of which it knew little helped destroy what was left of the delicate mechanism of ‘indirect rule’ inherited from the British.

Faced with a sharply deteriorating situation, the government made the first of several peace deals with the militants led by a local mul ah, Nek Mohammed Wazir, guaranteeing the withdrawal of troops and an amnesty in return for a promise to exclude foreign militants and cease attacks into Afghanistan. These deals were always inherently fragile, however. The militants were ready enough not to attack Pakistan, but insisted on their right to go on helping the Taleban’s jihad in Afghanistan. When the US struck back against them with missile strikes – or persuaded Pakistan to attack them – they al eged treachery on the part of the Pakistani government, and abrogated the agreement. This happened for the first time when, two months after the April 2004 peace deal, Nek Mohammed was kil ed by a US hel fire missile.

Heavy fighting in south Waziristan then continued intermittently until, in February 2005, the government signed a second deal along the same lines with Nek Mohammed’s successor, Beitul ah Mahsud. In September 2006, this truce was extended to north Waziristan. These agreements prevented major battles, but intermittent skirmishes continued; and the militants used the withdrawal of the army to extend their local power, execute or expel local enemies, and impose their version of Shariah law. They also of course continued to help the Afghan Taleban conduct their war against the US and the Karzai administration in Afghanistan. In response, the US continued to strike targets in the tribal areas with missiles.

The tribal areas in these years presented a bewildering picture to Western eyes, of local truces with the militants in some places even as heavy fighting took place elsewhere. This was widely assumed in the West to be the result of the duplicity of the Pakistani government and military. It certainly reflected a deep unwil ingness to launch a general assault in the whole region, partly for fear of the internal consequences for Pakistan, and partly because, with most of the army deployed against India, there were simply not enough troops available for this task.