Murder she wrote

If the government is truly sincere about drones, the should come up with a concrete counter-insurgency strategy.

Pakistan is like a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Its intelligence agencies are still caught up in the heady thrill of playing tie-me-up-tie-me-down with the bad boy Haqqani network, which has long done the dirty on US troops across the border.

Thus, says America’s top military man, Pakistan will have to stop biting the sadomasochistic hand that feeds and swallow, not spit, when it comes to US drones.

Admiral Mike Mullen’s visit this week appears to have been aimed at curtain-calling the latest chest-beating by the usual suspects in the wake of the Raymond Davis misadventure. The show, it seems, must go on.

Yet post-Obama’s Wars and post-WikiLeaks, this tiresome typecasting by PPP scriptwriters of Pakistan as the helpless fair maiden wrestling the clutches of the villainous superpower, borders on the farcical.

American think-tankers have long lambasted the Pakistani government’s ‘unhelpful hypocrisy’ in refusing to concede public ownership as the biggest obstacle to the drone programme’s effectiveness. “The Pakistani security establishment is hiding behind the drones, and blaming America. Yet it isn’t doing much to take on the militants,” is how Dr David Kilcullen put it to me last year. Kilcullen has served in both the US military and the State Department, and regularly challenges the tactical advantages of the drones.

If the government is truly sincere about a no-drone mandate, it could start by persuading its army chief to let go of his self-proclaimed India-centric myopia and come up with a concrete counter-insurgency strategy. Think, then, how much easier it would be to simply power off the green light it happily flicked on back in 2008, parliament and collateral damage be damned.

In the meantime, the government could also raise certain drone-specific questions, such as the August 2009 targeted killing of Baitullah Mehsud, the then Pakistani Taliban’s leader. In fact, this would sit neatly with the PPP’s parallel script of seeking accountability for the assassination of its former leader.

Mehsud reportedly denied any hand in Benazir Bhutto’s murder. President Asif Ali Zardari, according to a US State Department cable dated January 2008, dismissed Mehusd as a mere pawn. On his wife’s third death anniversary, Zardari publicly said that Mehsud was culpable — echoing the Musharraf regime’s unfaltering position — and now he was no more. Yet this hardly translates into a slam dunk.

The Taliban leader’s death was hailed by the US as a biggie on the drone hit parade. As one US expert on South Asian security put it to me, it signalled the first time that Washington had bothered to prioritise Pakistani security concerns. According to Mushahid Hussain Syed, a former Musharraf ally, this breakthrough was a long time coming. The regime, he said, had approached the US three times with Mehsud’s coordinates. “We began to think he was an American agent,” he told me, adding that the US only took action when the Taliban leader threatened to blow up New York.

This begs the question as to why the previous government was so keen to have Mehsud eliminated. Ditto as to why the Americans decided to take action a full eight months before the UN inquiry into Benazir’s murder published its findings — for even an alleged pawn could presumably provide some intelligence light-shedding.

And once done with all that, the government could perhaps find the time to explain why the president, in his own words, secured Musharraf’s honourable exit from Pakistan. This is the same government that has, after all, issued three arrest warrants for the former enemy combatant in connection with Benazir’s murder. The same government that is now beseeching Britain to hand him over to face Pakistani justice, rather than to the International Court of Justice on war crimes charges.

Instead of playing to the cheap seats, the PPP should come up with a new script that is of actual interest to the people. Farewell My Concubine no longer cuts it.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 22^nd, 2011.