Fighting other people’s wars

The war on terror brought internal clashes between jihadi outfits, emanating from the Soviet war, to a boiling point.

Over 40,000 deaths and thousands of terrorist attacks later, Pakistan will join the world in remembering 9/11 on the 10^th anniversary of the incident in 2011. In this part of the world, the memory of that day is now deeply buried under millions of tons of suspicion, mistrust, clash of civilisations narrative and growing radicalism. When the US and Isaf forces will indeed disengage from the region after two to three years, we will have hundreds and thousands of trained militants; some of whom are ensconced in our security structures, and a society which has a reduced capacity to imagine the ‘other’ in a more normal way.

Many in Pakistan believe this is a result of our country opting to fight the other’s war. However, the violence and conflict that we see is a sum total of the wars we opted to fight for others in return for some imagined political credibility, money and weapons. The conflict that emerged after 9/11 was partly imposed by the US and partly a result of a war that we ought not to have fought — the American war of the 1980s in Afghanistan against Soviet troops. We not only turned it into our war but propagated an imagined threat to our sovereignty being posed by the former USSR that had landed in Afghanistan out of its superpower arrogance to correct, what was considered a minor yet critical problem in its soft underbelly. General Ziaul Haq, who at that time was desperate for resources and political legitimacy, opted to partner with the CIA to exploit the fear of a threat of a Soviet invasion in both the US and Pakistan. Apparently, less than five per cent of US Congressmen believed that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a precursor to an attack on Pakistan. The threat of war from the USSR was, however, propagated to an extent which allowed the ISI and the CIA to legitimise the war in Afghanistan.

The price of the war for Pakistan was extremely high. The proliferation of drugs, weapons and corruption dates back to the 1980s. The war after 2001 is simply an epilogue of the earlier drama. The lack of pluralism or absence of inclusivity in our social, cultural and political discourses, which now appears in the form of growing radicalism and jihadism, is rooted in the 1980s. It was also the decade when the real pro-people liberal voices were forcibly quieted through coercion. According to Saadia Toor, who has just published a great account of liberal and Cold War politics in Pakistan, the CIA and Pakistan’s military establishment had partnered with the Jamaat-e-Islami and other religious groups to create the jihad machine and coerce the liberal voice in the country.

Intriguingly, the war in Afghanistan of the 1980s is not remembered as the ‘other’s war’ which did maximum damage to Pakistan. That was a war which set the pace for the disappearance of plural space in the country and increase in sectarian violence, mainly because the numerous jihadi outfits are deeply divided on sectarian lines. The war on terror merely brought those internal clashes emanating from the first war to a boiling point.

After 11 years of war and having caught and killed Osama bin Laden, the US seems willing to withdraw from the region. Yet again, Pakistan will be left with a large number of ‘strategic assets’ that have by now solidified their ideological perspective. But the post-1980s world was markedly different from the post-9/11 war decade. In the 1990s, there was still greater patience, with non-state actors re-engaging at different fronts, which they did, especially in Kashmir and Central Asia, mainly because the Zia regime wanted to forcibly shape up Afghanistan’s future to meet its requirements.

The situation is different today. We have China that is gradually replacing the US in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a major benefactor and investor. Its concerns with security in Southern China and security of its interests elsewhere will probably require that non-state actors be leashed well and proper. Thus far, Pakistan’s security establishment claims that it has no capacity to control splinter groups. This is an argument which even foreign scholars such as Stephen Tankel are encouraged to make. If the splinter groups are a reality then the state of Pakistan may be confronted with yet another situation on fighting someone else’s war on its territory. And if it can actually exercise better control then this is the time the government chalks out an extensive and serious plan to de-radicalise and demobilise these religious combatants. For Pakistan, this is the time to make choices.



Published in The Express Tribune, September 11^th, 2011.