Going it alone

After a corps commanders’ meeting on July 12, the Pakistan Army has reiterated its resolve to get rid of American trainers, scale back CIA activities in Pakistan and fight the war against terrorism from its own resources. This means that counterterrorism by Pakistan will be mounted without much training and, from now on, without much money from outside. This also means that the army will raise its own funds in addition to the money it gets from the national budget. That the army has its own source of income is well known, but the industries it is running will hardly give it enough financial ballast to keep flying.

The army had made the nation aware of its resolve to get rid of the Americans some time ago when a statement had said that the money given by the US to the Pakistan Army should be diverted to the civilian government. This statement could not have been an act of anger because when talking about strategy you don’t give in to extreme feelings. This moment is the time to think that if changing of friends is in the offing, who will be our future friends and how will one cope with old friends-turned-enemies? Of course, this transition is not all black and white and the visit of our ISI chief to Washington could be an attempt to resist populism at home and eschew Manichaeism in foreign policy.

How will the Pakistan Army fight terrorism in the days to come without much civilian training in the art of countering ‘the enemy within’? So far, the experience is that the civilian security is a total stranger to asymmetric war unleashed by well-trained al Qaeda terrorists and the jihadi warriors who have joined al Qaeda. Will the Pakistan Army maintain its old strategic posture in the region while switching from the US, or will it reconsider its now patently unsuccessful attempts at suiting the new situation to the old danger ‘from-the-east’ posture? In fact, the posture of yore has two disastrous aspects: Tacking the success in Afghanistan to the Pashtuns and facing eastward toward India by being unrelenting in India-centrism. Will the army change this binary of failure?

Facing up to terrorism without the US will not be easy if the policy towards Afghanistan remains static and lessons from the disaster of Pakistan’s support to a Taliban government in the past are not re-examined. Before facing inwards — how else to fight AlZawahiri, who has vowed to kill our military leaders? — to fight the Taliban, Pakistan will have to jiggle its kneejerk pavlovian reflex towards India. There was good tiding hidden in the speech Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani made recently in Azad Kashmir, with General Kayani standing by him, that was clearly an overture to India and was noted as such by New Delhi. Earlier, the outgoing Indian foreign secretary, Nirupama Rao, had signalled that there could actually be the beginning of a thaw in Pakistan-India relations this year. If we maintain our existing posture with India, we should forget about fighting the terrorists, with their apparent penetration of some sections of the armed forced.

Counterterrorism will also fail if the army’s stance vis-à-vis Afghanistan is not changed. Supporting the Pashtuns in Afghanistan is a double-edged sword which might mean that Pakistan loses yet another chunk of ungoverned space to the rising cross-border Pashtun passion for a separate state because the Pashtuns of Afghanistan can’t stomach the non-Pashtun nationalities of the north. The good sign is that Turkey has been roped in as a supporter of at least one nationality in Afghanistan, led by Rashid Dostum, who also interfaces nicely with Uzbekistan next door. The other neighbour whose interests cannot be ignored is Iran whose diplomats the Taliban killed in Mazar-e-Sharif in 1997 (for which Pakistan was blamed). Central Afghanistan and much of the north is Shia and will fight any Pashtun-led strategy by Pakistan. It is only after the regional reshuffle of strategy that the army can be supported in its policy of ‘going it alone’. One fact we should put in our pipes and smoke is: The terrorists are not going to come and kiss our hand because we have kicked the Americans out.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 14^th, 2011.