The Duel (38 page)

In the meantime the instability in Afghanistan is seeping over the
border into Pakistan. Even the secretary-general of NATO is beginning to understand the dangers inherent in this should it continue much longer. In a recent speech in Washington, Jaap Scheffer responded to a questioner by saying, “If instability in Pakistan and instability in the frontier means instability in Afghanistan, the opposite is also true.... We need to depart from the notion that Pakistan is not part of the solution, and we should not only brand Pakistan as part of the problem.... We have to do everything we can to assist and help the Pakistanis. . . . It’s my intention that as soon as there is a new government in Pakistan, I intend to travel again to Islamabad to talk to the president, to talk to the government, to see how we can lift the level of our political dialogue in the interest of minimizing this cross-instability around the borderline there.”

The new government in Pakistan inaugurated on March 26, 2008, has already made it clear that it intends to negotiate with the militants in Waziristan. John Negroponte and Richard A. Boucher, representing the U.S. State Department, were not warmly greeted when they arrived in Islamabad to meet Asif Zardari and Nawaz Sharif. The country’s largest daily, the
News,
published an editorial, “Hands Off Please, Uncle Sam,” that was extremely critical of U.S. interference in the country. Sharif too was surprisingly sharp, refusing to give Negroponte any guarantees or commitments on “fighting terrorism.” Sharif told the press, “If America wants to see itself clean of terrorists, we also want that our villages and towns should not be bombed. We do not like the fact that our country is now a killing field. We will negotiate with the militants to try and stop all this.” The problem for Pakistan’s elected government is that without a settlement in Afghanistan, it will find it difficult to stabilize the tribal areas on its western frontier.

The insurgents in Afghanistan are growing more audacious every month. In June 2008, a guerrilla contingent on motorbikes attacked the prison in Kandahar and freed one thousand prisoners. An embarrassed Karzai immediately
blamed
Pakistan and threatened to cross the border and teach Islamabad a lesson.

In reality, the strategic needs of the United States are now destabilizing the region. What if the people of the region reject these imperial fantasies? Will they, like their states, also be dissolved and created anew?

I
N
F
EBRUARY 2008, ONE OF
A
MERICA’S MOST VENERABLE THINK
tanks, the Brookings Institution of Washington, D.C., organized an exercise in moral abstraction under the rubric “The U.S.-Pakistan Strategic Relationship.” The panel at this event reflected the new pluralism, consisting largely of old friends. In this case, two military philosophers, General Anthony Zinni, onetime boss of U.S. CENTCOM, and General Jehangir Karamat, former chief of staff of the Pakistan army and onetime ambassador to Washington, flanked Richard Armitage, formerly of the State Department, who, as discussed earlier, gained enormous prestige in some quarters after 9/11 for threatening to reduce General Musharraf and Pakistan to the Stone Age. General Karamat, a decent and honorable empire-loyalist, who resisted temptation and never seized power in Pakistan, understood immediately what was expected of him on the Brookings platform. The strategic relationship was not about the inevitable strains in a sixty-year-old marriage, whose course and consequences I’ve attempted to outline in this book, but about the immediate needs of the United States, which have shaped Pakistani policy for decades.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” began poor General Karamat, “the sort of questions that are being asked in terms of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship right now are what is really happening in Pakistan’s western border areas, why is it happening, and what is Pakistan doing about it.” He tried to explain as best he could that the situation was complex, Pakistan
was not to blame for the expanding militancy and that the traditional tribal leaders had been virtually eliminated and replaced by militants. He warned gently against any attempt to erode Pakistan’s sovereignty because it would be counterproductive and concluded by stressing the importance of the “strategic relationship that has a great future.”

General Zinni was at his patronizing worst. He knew the Pakistan army well, he said. His first direct contact had been with a battalion that fought in Somalia in the early nineties and had performed extremely well in a difficult situation. He might have been General Charles Gordon commending the courage of his Indian sepoys in helping to crush the Taiping rebellion in nineteenth-century China. Zinni knew Karamat well and was pleased to inform the audience, “General Karamat is a graduate of Leavenworth, the Leavenworth Hall of Fame as a matter of fact. He takes pride in that, and I know that for a fact. That kind of connection, that kind of communication, made our ability to communicate and operate with each other despite the political climate much more effective.” Zinni was effusive in describing how helpful everyone had been on his 1999 trip to Pakistan when he had arrived to help out on the Kargil war with India. In reality, the U.S. general had come armed with an ultimatum from Bill Clinton: withdraw from Indian territory or else. Dennis Kux, another former State Department official on the South Asia desk, describes what actually happened:

Taken aback and dismayed by the Kargil adventure, the U.S. government responded vigorously—far more so than the Johnson administration had reacted during the early stages of the 1965 Kashmir war. President Clinton telephoned Nawaz Sharif to urge him to have his forces withdrawn and sent Gen. Anthony Zinni to Islamabad to second this message directly with the prime minister and with Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who had replaced Karamat as chief of army staff. Brushing aside Pakistan’s claim that it was not directly involved with the Kargil operation and lacked control over the mujahideen, the U.S. general urged Islamabad to see to it that the intruders pulled back across the Kashmir line of control. When
not even the Chinese, let alone the Americans, were willing to support the Pakistani position, Islamabad found itself internationally isolated . . . and decided to cut Pakistan’s losses.
*

It was thoughtful of Zinni not to rub this in on what was, after all, intended as a friendly occasion with a fixed purpose. Zinni backed Karamat’s view that Pakistan should not be overpressured on its western border. It had lost a lot of soldiers already. In fact, though Zinni did not say so, more Pakistani than U.S. soldiers or mercenaries have died in the cross-border Afghan war. The Pakistani military deliberately underestimates its casualties. The army claims that one thousand troops were killed during the Waziristan campaigns in 2004 through 2006. When in Peshawar in 2007, I was repeatedly told by local journalists that the real figure was over three thousand killed and many thousands wounded.

The show came to life when Richard Armitage took the microphone. Cutting through diplomatic niceties, Armitage pointed out that Pakistan was in a mess, had been so since 1947, and was no longer a country but four countries (a reference to the country’s four provinces) or a bit more if one saw Waziristan as Qaedistan. He accepted only partial U.S. responsibility for this state of affairs and isolated it to the U.S. mode of intervention during the Soviet-Afghan war: “We knew exactly what we were doing in Pakistan at the time, and we knew exactly what was going to happen in Afghanistan when we walked away. This was not a secret.” In other words they knew perfectly well that they had handed the country to religious groups and the ISI. What they were doing was using Pakistan as a “Kleenex” (as a senior official informed Dennis Kux) or, more accurately, a “condom” as a retired and embittered general once described the “strategic relationship” to me. As I have repeatedly stressed in this book, U.S. priorities determined Pakistan’s domestic and foreign policies from 1951 onward. The long period of foreplay culminated in the Afghan climax. So enthralled were the Pakistani
military by the experience that they became desperate to repeat it in Kashmir and Kargil, forgetting that a condom can’t do it on its own.

Crucially, Armitage, like Zinni and Karamat before him, opposed as counterproductive the pressuring of the Pakistan government to permit U.S. troops to operate on Pakistani soil, a discussion that had been taking place behind closed doors in Washington for well over a year. U.S. presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama had made an ill-judged intervention, publicly demonstrating his virility in military matters by supporting the hawks and calling for U.S. attacks inside Pakistan. Armitage said that he saw the future of Afghanistan related closely to a stable, democratic polity in Pakistan, but not a Venezuelanstyle democracy, an odd remark given that there is no immediate possibility of this, but certainly revealing of his other preoccupation. None of this appeared to have had an impact on the White House. On April 12, 2008, the American president informed ABC News that the most dangerous area in the world now was neither Iraq nor Afghanistan, but Pakistan, because of the presence of Al Qaeda, who were preparing attacks on the United States. The logic was obvious though not spelled out: preparing public opinion for possible search-and-destroy missions inside Pakistan. The drones, on their own, were not sufficient. The problem, which neither Armitage nor the retired generals addressed at all, was the war in Afghanistan and the problems of governance in Kabul, where a regime fully supported and supervised by the United States is supposedly in charge.

The future of the two countries is certainly interrelated, but as the 2008 elections in Pakistan demonstrated and as some of us have been arguing for some time, the religious groups and parties have little mass support, let alone the armed-struggle jihadi currents. The crisis resulting from Operation Enduring Freedom is now creating havoc inside Pakistan and affecting morale in its army. The solution to this lies in Kabul and Washington. Islamabad and the EU are simply loyal auxiliaries with little real leverage to resolve the crisis.

Britain’s most self-important viceroy to India, Lord Curzon, famously remarked that “no patchwork scheme will settle the Waziristan problem. . . . Not until the military steam-roller has passed over the country from end to end, will there be peace. But I do not want to
be the person to start that machine.” To expect the Pakistan army to do so, and as a result kill thousands of its own people from regions where it recruits soldiers, is to push it in a suicidal direction. Even the toughest command structure might find it difficult to maintain unity in these conditions.

Were this attempted directly by the United States, the Pakistan army would split, and hordes of junior officers would likely decamp to the mountains and resist. The military high command, regularly receiving reports of substantial numbers of soldiers surrendering to much smaller contingents of guerrillas, is well aware that the war in the Frontier Province is extremely unpopular among its troops. The soldiers surrender because they don’t want to fight “America’s war” or kill coreligionists. Junior officers have been taking early retirement to avoid a second tour of duty on the Afghan border. This being the case today, it is not difficult to imagine the result of a direct U.S. intervention inside Pakistan.

At the time of this writing, the Iraq war has cost $3 trillion. An allout war inside Pakistan would require a great deal more. Were the Pakistan army to accept money and weaponry to become the steamroller referred to by Lord Curzon, the “jihadi finger on the nuclear trigger” so frequently cited by the West might well become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The regional solution, as I argued in the preceding chapter, is the only serious way out of this crisis.

Armitage accepted that religious extremism had little support in Pakistan, but stressed the crisis of leadership and governance, pointing out the lack of an obvious replacement for President Musharraf:

Unfortunately, the late Benazir Bhutto had a chance as a democratically elected leader, and I think it not for nothing that she found herself in Dubai for a number of years, and Mr. Nawaz Sharif also has had his difficulties. I am not being particularly nasty, I am just pointing out the fact that one of the things that we have to deal with now is that we do not have a ready candidate for soldier of the month.

This view is not much different from my own, with the following proviso. The search for a military pinup to salvage a crisis should come
to a permanent halt. The latest incumbent, like his predecessors, has been an abject failure, as the imposition of an emergency revealed. On this, Stephen Cohen, another Brookings expert who specializes in Pakistan, was much sharper in a preelection exchange with me on the
Financial Times
website:

I’d say that more Americans now see [Musharraf] as a liability, and this begins with the US military who have encountered Pakistan-based Taliban.... At best I see Musharraf being eased out by a combination of the Pakistan army, which must find him now to be an embarrassment, and foreign supporters, including the US but certainly China and the Europeans who realise that Pakistan must have coherent and effective leadership to tackle its many problems, not least of which is the growing violence in the society.

While there is truth to this, Cohen, like most U.S. analysts, underestimates the way that continuous Washington-backed military interventions have wrecked the organic evolution of politics in Pakistan, leaving it in the hands of mediocre and mottled politicians who have, till now, shown few signs of learning from past mistakes and whose only skill is in the relentless pursuit of personal wealth. Musharraf signed his political death warrant when he joined up with one such political faction—the Chaudhrys of Gujrat—to help him retain power. It was a signal that, under his watch, nothing was going to change.