McMaster’s visit: what to do with Pakistan?

Just three days after the visit of US National Security Adviser Lieutenant General HR McMaster to Pakistan, an enormous security breach and deadly attack in Afghanistan, killing over 130 Afghan soldiers, was reported. The attack took place on a military base in Mazar-e-Sharif, the capital of Balkh province of Afghanistan. Initial reports on the attack suggested that it could not have materialised if the security arrangements at the entrance were foolproof. Even if the assailants were led by four soldiers, who, according to Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, were inside the base and had long been Taliban infiltrators, others that accompanied them should have been identified as outsiders. If ‘forced entrance’ was employed then the assailants should not have succeeded without encountering two to three defensive tiers, before they penetrate through to the unarmed soldiers vacationing on a Friday.

It was a terrorist attack that seemed preventable. Pakistan, which has been a victim of similar security breaches in the past, has over the years hardened the safety and safeguard methods at its security installations that today are no longer easy to breach or penetrate. Maybe the Afghan security forces have a thing or two to learn from their neighbours, but would they be willing to?

Given the language the US national security adviser used for Pakistan while he was visiting Afghanistan, it appears that it is not in the interest of the external powers to create an enabling environment in which the two neighbouring countries could engage in a solution finding dialogue. What is clear though is that the attack on the military base, which is also the headquarters of Afghan National Army’s 209 Corps, was an act of revenge on Afghan security forces and their international backers deployed in the country for killing the Taliban’s senior leaders. Such a ferocious attack shows us the military reach and potency of the deep-rooted Taliban insurgency. If anything, it suggests that the breeding grounds of the Taliban are all over Afghanistan and those who accuse Pakistan of doing little to prevent cross-border Taliban movement must realise that such movements can take place across the 965-km border that Afghanistan shares with Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

A day prior to his visit to Pakistan, McMaster in an interview to an Afghan television channel spoke Lisa Curtis’s language, the US adviser on South Asian affairs. Considering a hardline in dealing with Pakistan, he said “the security forces in Pakistan must go after the militant groups less selectively,” adding that “Pakistan must pursue its interests in Afghanistan, and elsewhere, through the use of diplomacy and not through the use of proxies.”

It is vital to recall that Curtis, before joining the White House, co-authored with Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the US, a damning report signed by 12 other think tank experts on Pakistan that was published by Hudson and Heritage Foundation in the US. The report asked the Trump administration to ‘review its policy on Pakistan’ — a policy that saw the Obama administration engaging in strategic dialogue with Pakistan and simultaneously offering civilian and military aid to the country. The report criticises this policy, claiming it to be ineffective as it failed to change Pakistan’s behaviour.



The report instead recommends that the Trump administration back off from supporting Pakistan, unless it ‘shuts down all Islamic militant groups’ that allegedly operate from within the country. According to the report, “the objective of the Trump administration’s policy should be to make it more and more costly for Pakistani leaders to employ a strategy of supporting terrorist proxies to achieve regional strategic goals.” The costs Haqqani and think tank experts figured for Pakistan interestingly, include revoking its status of the US’s major non-Nato ally within six months, targeting alleged Taliban safe houses in Quetta through drone attacks, asking Pakistan to re-arrest Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, the alleged ringleader of the 2008 Mumbai attack, and banning Pakistan’s military and ISI officials, who may have been known to have facilitated acts of terrorism, from travelling to the US. Lastly, if all these fail to force Pakistan to change its behaviour, then the country should be declared a “state sponsor of terrorism.”

These harsh new policy options must be music to the ears of the Modi-led government in India. So should be McMaster’s criticism of imperfections of Pakistan military’s operations against terrorism. However, the wishful thinking of India, of Pakistan’s imminent collapse under the weight of international isolation and likely sanctions for supporting terrorism, is an embarrassment for a country that itself continues to resort to the worst kind of state terrorism in Indian-held Kashmir.

McMaster must know that unless India agrees to embrace Pakistan in a comprehensive dialogue engagement, the environment of insecurity will continue to prevail in South Asia and most particularly in Afghanistan. Pakistan is a nuclear power, which cannot be threatened or blackmailed into submission, Its nuclear and missile ability is well dispersed and spread all over the country in secret locations. India knows that it cannot take out these weapons with a single blow and Pakistan would most certainly retain the ability to respond to any Indian aggression in kind. Hence, war between the two is not an option.

If the Trump administration needs a new strategy to deal with Pakistan, then it will have to let go off Curtis and our sold-out former ambassador’s recommended ‘threat doctrine’, and substitute it with a more realistic ‘doctrine of mutual engagement’ between India and Pakistan. McMaster’s predecessors Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley and even James Jones knew that although it is Pakistan that the US continues to ask to ‘do more’ but India too complicates the situation in Afghanistan.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 28^th, 2017.

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