A quick lesson from recent history

If only we had not wasted resources on those 2 10-year-long, low intensity wars; if only we had renounced terrorism.

It is always a good policy to take a quick look back at the immediate political history before embarking on a new democratic journey. The immediate five or 10 years do matter in any such consideration but to get a fair idea about what went wrong and what did not, it is always advisable to study the history spanning, at least, the last 25 years. There have been many events during this period that have played a significant role in determining the myriad and multifarious crises that we are now facing. But the one thing that decisively determined our current predicament was the decision of a resource-poor, dole-dependent Pakistan to wage two 10-year-long, low intensity wars, until forced in 2001, to abandon them by the events that followed the Twin Tower tragedy. Of these two wars, one we fought in Afghanistan on the side of Mullah Omar’s Taliban against Ahmed Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance and the other, inside the Indian-held Kashmir against the Indian Army. Both these wars were being waged on our behalf by state-sponsored non-state actors.

What were we up to? Well, the US had just left the scene after the collapse of the Soviet Union and we saw in the emerging leadership vacuum in the region, an opportunity to translate into reality our long-cherished but misplaced desire of becoming a dominant player in our part of the world. And why not? To start with, only recently we had “defeated” a superpower. And the newly-independent Central Asian Muslim countries offered us a fair ground to expand our strategic influence. Meanwhile, India made our task easier by forcing us to bring out our basement bomb and put it on display to claim membership in the exclusive nuclear club. To test the waters, we had also provoked the Indians into exposing their offensive capabilities by challenging them in Kargil. The Indians did not retaliate because of our bomb but we seem to have lost forever our Kashmir case and the status of the most allied ally of the US as well, in the process.

Next, we removed the elected prime minister and then helped form the MMA — an impossible alliance of the religious parties, most of whom were not even on talking terms with one another. The idea was to install a Jamaat-e-Islami-led MMA government at the centre after the 2002 elections to make Pakistan’s hegemonic ambitions attractive enough, and therefore, acceptable to the elements leading a resurgent Muslim awakening in the Central Asian countries. Those who doubted the MMA’s ability to win enough seats to form government in Islamabad were persuaded to go along when they saw a Jamaat man winning the mayorship in the MQM-dominated Karachi.

One recalls vividly, the red carpet reception accorded to President Pervez Musharraf by the Jamaat workers on his return from the Agra talks as if he was coming back with Kashmir in his pocket. All that the Indians were asking in Agra was for us to talk about terrorism in Indian-held Kashmir in return for initiating talks on Kashmir. But we said no. Let us settle the Kashmir issue first and then alone, we said, we can consider talks on terrorism. But after 9/11, we found terrorism knocking on our own doors.

If only we had not wasted our resources on those two 10-year-long, low intensity wars; if only we had renounced terrorism when it was in our interest to do so and; if only we had not disbanded the commando company that the then prime minister had ordered raised under General (retd) Ziauddin Butt for mounting a clandestine operation to capture Osama bin Laden hiding in Afghanistan and hand him over to the US. Instead, the first thing Musharraf did after the takeover was to dissolve the commando company.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 5^th, 2013.

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