Pakistan: A Hard Country (82 page)
The TNSM/Taleban never made an explicit public appeal to Guj ars and Kammis against the Yusufzai Pathans – they could not possibly have done, being overwhelmingly Yusufzais themselves. Given Yusufzai dominance, such an appeal would also have been fatal to the militants’ chances. Rather they did two things: by stressing their ideological commitment to an egalitarian community of al Muslims, they appealed to Guj ar and Kammi sentiments in a looser and vaguer way; and they redressed – often savagely – particular acts of oppression by khans against these communities.
Thus I was told that more than a decade before the TNSM rebel ion began, the son of a khan had abducted and raped a Kammi girl, and had of course never been prosecuted for this. He had already fled, but the Taleban burned down his family home and drove them out, saying that this was overdue punishment for the rape, ‘and, of course, that got al the Kammis of the neighbourhood on their side’.
As a result of the army crushing the Taleban in Swat in 2009, the old khan families, good and bad, are coming back – and it remains to be seen if the bad ones have learned a lesson from what happened to them, or whether they wil simply use the army to restore their power, take revenge on their enemies and resume their old oppressions. This is a danger which has some Pakistani soldiers of my acquaintance seriously worried. Structures of local wealth and authority in Swat have been further damaged by the floods of 2010. Al of this suggests that while the army’s reconquest of Swat in the summer of 2009 has proved that it wil fight to preserve Pakistan and that Pakistan wil therefore be preserved, it wil not be the end of Islamic militancy in this region.
This is also demonstrated by the progress of fighting in FATA. The Pakistan army’s reconquest of Swat was fol owed by offensives in south Waziristan and other areas of FATA which regained much territory and kil ed some 570 Pakistani Taleban fighters (76 soldiers also died). The Pakistani Taleban response was greatly to intensify their terrorist attacks inside Pakistan and make them even more indiscriminate.
By February 2010, according to official figures, 7,598 civilians had died in Pakistan, as a result of terrorist attacks, Taleban executions, military action, or US drone attacks. It is worth noting that this figure is two and a half times the number of Americans kil ed on 9/11. By that time, 2,351 soldiers had been kil ed – two and a half times US military deaths in Afghanistan.13 According to Pakistani official estimates (which may of course be exaggerated) by mid-2010 the conflict with the Pakistani Taleban and their al ies had cost Pakistan some $35
bil ion dol ars in state spending and economic losses – almost twice the $18 bil ion in US aid that Pakistan had received by that date.
During the same period, according to the Pakistani military, the Pakistani Taleban and their al ies had lost 17,742 men kil ed or captured – though how many of these were real fighters rather than sympathizers is impossible to say. What can be said is that, despite al this, as of late 2010 the militants remained in control of much of FATA; and, also, that the Pakistan military seemed highly unwil ing to attack them in some areas like north Waziristan – apparently because this would risk bringing the Pakistani forces into conflict with the Afghan Taleban and their al ies (especial y the fol owers of the Haqqani clan) based in these areas. So despite the much tougher approach to Pakistan’s own Taleban threat in 2009 – 2010, action against the Afghan Taleban continued to be limited by al the factors set out in this book, and this in turn limited to some extent action against Pakistani militants, at least in FATA.
The continued strength of militancy in these areas is, however, not due chiefly to constraints on the Pakistani military. As in many other Pathan territories in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the roots of Taleban support are far too old and deep to be eradicated by military action alone – yet the Pakistani political parties, civilian bureaucracy and private businessmen al seem very far from being able to back up military action with real local development, let alone a more equitable political and judicial system. By 2010, the threat that militants would push the Pakistani state into col apse had been defeated – in so far as it had ever existed; but terrorism and local unrest wil be with Pakistan for the foreseeable future.
Conclusions
It should be clear from this book that Pakistan, though a deeply troubled state, is also a tough one; and that, barring catastrophic decisions in Washington, New Delhi – and of course Islamabad – it is likely to survive as a country. In the long run, the greatest threat to Pakistan’s existence is not insurgency, but ecological change.
However, Pakistani farmers are also tough and adaptable, and while some areas like the Quetta val ey are likely to suffer disastrous water shortages in the near future, in the country as a whole, drought wil take several decades to become truly catastrophic; and floods, though devastating in the short term, can also be control ed and harnessed given determination, organization and money. This al ows time for human action to ameliorate the impending crisis, if the West, China and of course Pakistan itself have the wil to take this action.
The rest of the world should work hard to help Pakistan, because, as I have emphasized, long after Western forces have left Afghanistan, Pakistan’s survival wil remain a vital Western and Chinese interest.
This should encourage cooperation between Beijing and Washington to ensure Pakistan’s survival. By contrast, a Sino-US struggle for control over Pakistan should be avoided at al costs, as this would add enormously to Pakistan’s destabilization.
In the short term, of course, Western policy towards Pakistan wil be shaped by developments in Afghanistan, but this policy should not be dictated by those developments. For Pakistan is in the end a great deal more important and potential y dangerous than Afghanistan.
Whatever strategy the US ends up adopting in Afghanistan, Pakistan wil be critical to its success. Quite apart from Islamabad’s strategic calculations, this is made inevitable by the fact that more than half of the Pathan ethnicity lives in Pakistan, while maintaining a strong interest in what happens to the Pathans on the other side of the Durand Line.
Whatever happens, Pakistan wil therefore insist both that Pathans are strongly represented in any Afghan regime, and that Islamabad has a share of influence in Afghanistan, at least to the point where other countries – meaning above al India – cannot use Afghanistan as a base from which to threaten Pakistan.
No conceivable short-term gains in the Western campaign in Afghanistan or the ‘war on terror’ could compensate for the vastly increased threats to the region and the world that would stem from Pakistan’s col apse, and for the disasters that would result for Pakistan’s own peoples. Though many Indians may not see it this way, the col apse of Pakistan would also be disastrous for India, generating chaos that would destabilize the entire region. Western and Indian strategy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan should therefore be devised with this fact firmly in mind.
This should include recognition, at least in private, that it has above al been the US-led campaign in Afghanistan which has been responsible for increasing Islamist insurgency and terrorism in Pakistan since 2001. By this I do not mean to advocate a humiliating US and British scuttle from Afghanistan, nor to suggest that a Western withdrawal from Afghanistan would end the extremist threat to Pakistan, a threat which has long since developed a life of its own.
Nonetheless, concern for the effects of the US military presence in Afghanistan on the situation in Pakistan is one of the strongest arguments for bringing that presence to an end as soon as this can honourably be achieved, and against conducting more wars against Muslim states under any circumstances whatsoever.
This also implies that the US should observe restraint in its pressure on Pakistan. Drone attacks on Pakistan’s tribal areas have kil ed many Taleban and Al Qaeda leaders, but they have not noticeably impaired the Afghan Taleban’s ability to go on fighting effectively, while causing outrage among Pakistanis – especial y because of the very large numbers of women and children who have also been kil ed by the attacks. The US ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, discussed the risks of the drone strategy in a cable sent to the State Department in 2009 and revealed by WikiLeaks. She acknowledged that drones had kil ed ten out of twenty known top Al Qaeda leaders in the region, but stated that they could not entirely eliminate the Al Qaeda leadership and, in the meantime:
Increased unilateral operations in these areas risk destabilizing the Pakistani state, alienating both the civilian government and military leadership, and provoking a broader governance crisis within Pakistan without final y achieving the goal [of eliminating the Al Qaeda and Taleban leadership].1
The wel -substantiated belief that – despite official denials – the Pakistani high command and government have provided information to the US in return for strikes against Pakistani Taleban leaders has also been confirmed by WikiLeaks. As Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani told US officials in August 2008, ‘I don’t care if they do it as long as they get the right people. We’l protest in the National Assembly, then ignore it.’2
Pakistani acquiescence in the drone strikes, however, damaged the prestige of the military in society and the morale of ordinary soldiers, and encouraged the perception of the military as a ‘force for hire’.
There should therefore be no question of extending the attacks to new areas of Balochistan or Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, which would further enrage local society, spread the Pakistani Taleban insurgency to new areas, and reduce existing Pakistani cooperation with the US.
Even more dangerous is the presence of US special forces on the ground in Pakistan. Reports of this in Pakistan are greatly exaggerated. According to the US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks, as of October 2009 only sixteen such US soldiers were deployed in Pakistan, to two Pakistani military bases in north and south Waziristan. While they are doing some useful work against the Taleban, they are also potential hostages to fortune, and likely to provoke mass anger at their presence in the population and the military.3
Above al , as this book has argued, there must be no open intervention of US ground forces in FATA, as this risks outright mutiny in the Pakistani army. This restraint should be observed even if the US
comes under new terrorist attack. Britain should use whatever influence it possesses in Washington to oppose any such interventions, which could have the most disastrous effects on both terrorism and ethnic relations within Britain itself.
Pakistan’s links to the Afghan Taleban, hitherto seen in the West overwhelmingly as a problem, should also be seen as potential y a critical asset in the search for an exit from Afghanistan. We might as wel try to use Pakistan in this way, since, as the US embassy in Islamabad reported gloomily but accurately in September 2010: There is no chance that Pakistan wil view enhanced [US]
assistance levels in any field as sufficient compensation for abandoning support to these groups [i.e. the Afghan Taleban and their al ies] which it sees as an important part of its national security apparatus against India. The only way to achieve a cessation of such support is to change the Pakistani government’s perception of its security requirements.4
The US and other Western countries fighting in Afghanistan should use Pakistan as an intermediary to initiate talks with the Taleban in the hope of eventual y reaching a settlement, if, as seems highly probable, the attempt to defeat the Taleban by force does not succeed. Because of its links with the Taleban, Pakistan wil have to play a key role in bringing about such negotiations. In 2010 the Obama administration began to move towards the idea of talks, but stil seemed very far away from a recognition of what such talks would real y entail. In the words of a senior Pakistani diplomat:
The US needs to be negotiating with the Taliban, those Taliban with no links to al-Qaida. We need a power-sharing agreement in Afghanistan and it wil have to be negotiated with al the parties ... The Afghan government is already talking to al the stakeholders, the Taliban, the Haqqani network, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and Mul ah Omar. The Americans have been setting ridiculous preconditions for talks. You can‘t lay down such preconditions when you are losing.5
Such a Western strategy should also stem from a recognition that Pakistan’s goals in Afghanistan are in part legitimate – even if the means by which they have been sought have not been – and this legitimacy needs to be recognized by the West. The US and EU
should work hard to try to reconcile legitimate Pakistani goals in Afghanistan with those of India, and to draw other regional states into a consensus on how to limit the Afghan conflict. China, close to Pakistan and fearful of Islamist extremism, could be a key player in this regard.
The US needs to continue to limit Indian involvement in Afghanistan if it is to have any hope of a long-term cooperative relationship with Pakistan. The West also needs to seek a peaceful solution to the Kashmir dispute, despite al the immense obstacles in both Pakistan and India. As Ambassador Patterson told her government: Most importantly, it is the perception of India as the primary threat to the Pakistani state that colours its perceptions of the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s security needs. The Pakistani establishment fears that a pro-Indian government in Afghanistan would al ow India to operate a proxy war against Pakistan from its territory ... Increased Indian investment in, trade with, and development support to the Afghan government, which the USG [US government] has encouraged, causes Pakistan to embrace Taliban groups as anti-India al ies. We need to reassess Indian involvement in Afghanistan and our own policies towards India ... Resolving the Kashmir dispute would dramatical y improve the situation.6