Secret deals and gora infatuation

First, Pakistani tin-pot leaders make secret deals & leak to Western press, then coroborate it to same Western press.

Finally, former General-President Pervez Musharraf has told the CNN that he had cut a secret deal with the Bush administration on drone strikes. Nothing surprising, though this is the first “official” acceptance of such a deal.

I wrote as far back as 2008 that Islamabad (note that I don’t use the term “government”) had a covert arrangement on the strikes and was using a strategy that was likely to wilt under the weight of its own contradiction. Covert action relies on a fundamental necessity: plausible deniability. While there has been much denying, there hasn’t been much plausibility.

In fact, Musharraf is still being mealy-mouthed. The deal was about more than “maybe two or three” strikes. Musharraf has used the classic tactic of letting some truth out to hide the full extent of it. He should know that when you get into bed with the Americans, you are either caught in flagrante delicto or after the act.

But let it be said: while Musharraf set this policy, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) government and the military leadership that succeeded Musharraf made no effort — until the Raymond Davis episode — to change it. In fact, as I have written elsewhere, when I argued some years ago with a couple of PPP federal ministers about the need to come clean on this policy, they told me it was neither possible nor politic to do so.

My argument was — based on knowing the “chatter” in Washington DC and the increasing tactical efficacy of the platform — that because Washington will ramp up the use of drones, it will become increasingly difficult for Islamabad to keep up the facade of rejecting such strikes publicly while agreeing to them privately. That’s exactly what has happened.

That said, let’s make one clear distinction between how the strikes originally began and what they have degenerated into. The original deal was about “personality strikes”, hitting those who were known to be making trouble. Of course, the problem of legality remained — and remains — even when specific people are targeted. But then the Americans entered murkier waters: signature strikes based, as we now know, on what the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) calls the “disposition matrix”.

Increasing unilateralism by Washington, which resulted in creating a spy network in Pakistan, the movement from personality to signature strikes that kept Pakistan out of the loop or merely informed Islamabad of an incoming strike, and deteriorating US-Pakistan relations, owed to these and other factors, were reasons for Pakistan to start genuine agitation over these attacks.

Pakistan’s condemnation of drone strikes and America’s continuation of them has become the central plank, in many ways, of US-Pakistan relations. And that has to do with Islamabad’s changed policy since March 2011 and the fact that such attacks, unilateral as they are, hurt Pakistan’s sovereignty. Much has already been written about this from a legal perspective as also about the internal debates within the Obama Administration. At least one US ambassador, Cameron Munter, had to leave because he knew and refused to accept that the CIA station chief in Islamabad was to act as the plenipotentiary rather than Munter himself.

This, if nothing else, should inform us of the direction the US war took, pushing the tactical to a higher rung at the expense of strategy and, in the process, losing the war in Afghanistan despite killing many Taliban and al Qaeda leaders and fighters. This is what happens when the conduct of wars is given away to intelligence agencies. Between the CIA and the ISI, this region has become the nightmare of a policymaker. But that’s another debate.

An important point to note here is that I have not sought to go into the legality of these strikes. It should be obvious that the degree of difficulty in legitimising these strikes increases tremendously as we move from the concept of taking out a particular person to killing whole groups of people on the basis of some “disposition matrix” that can be applied to a range of people. Even in the case of particular targets, while operationally the platform provides a good option, killing thus, without due process, is problematic. But then, there can be no due process in a war and courts can’t sentence people in absentia.

But quite apart from drones and secret deals, there’s another issue that I have written about before but which needs to be flagged again. Officials and politicians in this country, whether serving or retired, civil or military, happily give access to foreigners but put up this great charade of secrecy with analysts at home.

In January 2009, in a piece for the Daily Times, under the caption, “Kalas, no; goras, yes”, this is what I wrote:

“Why is it considered essential to give access to foreign writers, analysts and media representatives when similar access is denied to writers, researchers, analysts and journalists from Pakistan?

“It is a very serious matter and one on which I have seen no debate in this country. This article is an attempt to start this debate.

“I can quote a number of works and reports over the years to flag this point — Stephen Cohen’s book The Pakistan Army; Emma Duncan’s Breaking the Curfew; Christina Lamb’s Waiting for Allah and a host of short and long newspaper and journal reports … ”

The trend continues and the article failed to generate any debate (this will, too). The list of names above is not exhaustive at all. Even the ISI “patriots” jump at the opportunity to speak with foreigners while keeping a faux stiff upper-lip with and appropriate distance from kala writers. And now Musharraf goes and blabbers to the CNN.

There’s a double-whammy here. First, the Pakistani tin-pot leaders, military and civil, make secret deals which are leaked to the press in the West by officials in the know, and then they allow access to the same press to corroborate sheepishly, partially or wholly, what happened or didn’t. There’s some kind of masochism involved in this exercise. Whatever the reasons, it is shameful and the point should be constantly agitated.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 17^th, 2013.