Afghanistan: A response to Musharraf — II

The writer was a Ford Scholar at the Programme in Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security at UIUC (1997) and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution's Foreign Policy Studies Programme

Pakistan’s Taliban policy initially had two more actors: Ismail Khan and Rashid Dostum. The policy was pushed by Major-General Naseerullah Babar (retd), then interior minister in Benazir Bhutto’s second government. The ISI was initially reluctant to let go of its old proxies, especially Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami. But Babar managed to sell it to the Agency through a clique of Pashtun officers.

The policy began showing early signs of failure. The intransigent Taliban attacked Herat early in the game, were beaten back and wanted Pakistan’s support to dislodge Ismail Khan. Instead of whipping them into falling in line, Pakistan helped them and thus undercut an essential dimension of its own policy. The Taliban tail, from then onwards, began wagging the Pakistani dog.

The situation reached a point where, having lost the policy direction, Pakistan rested content with putting all its eggs in the Taliban basket. In time, Dostum was also lost. And while the Taliban controlled 95 per cent of the territory, the rest of the world was arrayed against them — and Pakistan — and backed the Northern Alliance.

The US, which had initially gone along with Pakistan for various reasons — not least because of lobbying by the American oil giant Unocal for the Turkmenistan oil and gas pipelines and its traditional alliance with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, both of which were backing the Taliban — had jumped off the bandwagon by November 1997 when Madeleine Albright visited Pakistan.

The point is that far from being a passive player left holding the baby, Pakistan was an aggressive, pro-active player trying to shape the environment to its perceived advantage even in the teeth of opposition by a number of other state actors. Attempts by the Foreign Office to change the direction were rebuffed by the ISI.

At home, the Taliban’s literalism was linking up with home-grown extremism, one supplementing the other. It had become, and remains, a classic example of bidirectional causality. And it is this mindset that has made it so difficult for Pakistan — when Musharraf was in power and now — to contain and roll back the menace of extremist terrorism.

The US had become interested in the Northern Alliance also because of the presence in Afghanistan of al Qaeda. The organisation had come into existence in the first phase of the jihad but had become dormant until the Kuwait crisis. Osama bin Laden had left Afghanistan but relocated to Nangarhar after the US missile strikes in Sudan and eastern Afghanistan in August 1998 and pressure brought to bear on Khartoum by Riyadh.

This fact and what al Qaeda was up to were woefully ignored by Pakistan in its drive to back the Taliban. By the time Pakistan and Saudi Arabia got round to dealing with the problem, they found that dealing with Mullah Omar was akin to banging one’s head against a wall.

This is, of course, a very sketchy account. There are innumerable smaller details that are generally important to complete the picture. But I have attempted this for three reasons: all players were playing for their perceived interests, Pakistan most aggressively; the environment was getting shaped to give results which the world saw on 9/11; the area has become a hotbed of extremism and rooting it out would be a long-drawn and very painful process.

Musharraf has given a future road map. Without going into any details, because this is an issue on which I have extensively and repeatedly written in several publications, let me just say that counterinsurgency — the term is used in a broad context — strategies look fairly sexy on the drawing board but yield poor results unless the insurgent/terrorist is dislocated from the context in which he operates.

Musharraf was at the helm for eight years. Most operations undertaken at the time were dismal failures. They were conducted without proper planning, equipment and higher direction. Troops were inducted in operational areas without proper training and it was only in 2008 that the army decided to set up battle inoculation training centres and embarked on a more integrated plan to use force.

But as I have mentioned in two recent articles in this newspaper —“Winning a loss” and “COIN dilemmas” — the challenge is to make the insurgent irrelevant to the population. This is the toughest task in our case because of how the state has shaped society over nearly four decades. The recruitment base is this society and so far we have been unable to target and contain this base.

Musharraf is right about bringing moderation to society. But he should also concede his own failure on that count. He could not change the syllabi for political reasons. Neither Musharraf’s government nor the present one has been able to control the mosque and the seminary. Banned extremist groups have continued to resurface under new names and sectarian hatred continues to take toll of precious lives.

Sections of the media have only made the task of correction for the state more difficult. Glasnost has come without perestroika and has confounded the confusion. On top of all this, there is no indication that the army-ISI combine has changed its strategic and threat perceptions.

Musharraf talks about the groups for which there is tremendous sympathy in Pakistan. That is the problem. Just because some groups might be facing India rather than the West, or troubling us internally, does not mean they afford a lesser ideological threat to this state. Public sympathy is what has made it so difficult for the state to isolate and destroy these groups. And it is precisely for this reason that Musharraf, while accepting that al Qaeda is now spread out in the world, argues that “the centre of gravity of all this extremism and terrorism, however, lies in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan.”

He is only partially right. This menace does not have any defined centre of gravity now, the threat having become protean. But yes, it is greater here than elsewhere because the society as a whole is out of joint. This is why it is so difficult to implement the strategy of dislocation.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 1^st, 2011.