Pakistan: Mr Khan in Wonderland

The chairman of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, Imran Khan, has penned an article in this newspaper – Dialogue: the best of difficult options – explaining his position on the Taliban threat. It’s good that Khan has presented his position in writing, which can be scrutinised and debated. He opens his spell with a reference to East Pakistan, informing us that the events leading to “the breakup of our country, left me with a strong conviction that military operations are never a solution to any problem, least of all one involving one’s own people”. This is a very loose ball. While the now-Bangladeshis wanted to secede for political reasons, the Taliban, far from wanting to secede, actually want to conquer this state. They are not saying ‘you go your way and we shall ours’. They want us to surrender and give up our land. Perhaps, we should set aside this fundamental difference for the sake of making room for Khan’s two-staged operative objection about use of force against own people. My position on the normative aspect of this statement is not far from Khan’s. I shall go a step further and say that the use of force even against another state must be an option of last resort. This should establish two facts: one, it is never a happy situation where one might have to resort to the use of force; two, one may yet do it and states have done it, not just against other states but also against internal threats. I may also indicate to Khan that the secession of East Pakistan, in the final analysis, came because of an external military push. It is a counterfactual but perhaps he should give a thought to the question of whether East Pakistan could have seceded without that massive military help. Finally, and because the argument above must not be misconstrued as taking away from the socio-political and economic grievances of East Pakistan, it is important to note that the debacle in that wing was not a military one. In taking a snapshot view of what happened in East Pakistan, Khan is losing the longer, political trajectory that led to the use of force, even if we grant, with hindsight, that that policy in its details and planning could have been better, if not entirely different. But, as I have argued above, it is equally imperative to see whether without a full-fledged Indian invasion of East Pakistan, we would have seen the secession. A good example of that is Occupied Kashmir. Khan then goes on to say that he “stood firmly with those who opposed Musharraf’s Balochistan operation and earlier the sending of the military into Waziristan”. I agree. Balochistan was best dealt with politically. But Baloch sub-nationalism is again a secessionist threat. It cannot be put in the same category as the Taliban threat. As for sending the military into Waziristan, Khan makes two mistakes. One, it is factually incorrect to say that the army was never deployed to the tribal agencies before 2004. He should read the history of 7 Division and the raising of XI Corps with the addition of 9 Div. His other mistake is to imply that the tribal agencies should be left as an anachronism. Khan, perhaps unknowingly, is correct in assuming that the military, initially, was quite unaware of how to deal with the situation. The fault was General Musharraf’s. The operations conducted between 2004 and 2007 were flawed in many ways, alternating between suing for peace and using force without much thought to the politico-strategic ends of either. Moreover, Khan continues to suggest that the tribal areas were an idyllic place into which the state inducted the serpent. That is absolutely incorrect. Al-Qaeda and other sundry foreign fighters had ingressed into the area. They were not only using the tribal areas as sanctuaries but also planning and executing attacks from Pakistani territory into other states and inside Pakistan. That situation needed to be addressed. While one can criticise the conduct of the operations, to imply that operations were the cause of what we face today is to reverse causality rather arbitrarily. This war did not begin in 2004. Its enabling environment started shaping in the early eighties with the two policies of Islamisation at home and support for the Afghan mujahideen. The extremism begotten of one began to complement the jihadist millenarianism of the other. Groups and individuals nourished in this environment began to think and act supra-state. Khan’s party represents the state and the state simply cannot accept actions and motives that go beyond and above it. This means, first, that Khan’s starting point for this conflict on the historical tragedy is flawed and, second, that this mindset will not vanish when the last American troops pull out of Afghanistan. If anything, unless we adopt domestic and regional strategies to root it out, including but not exclusively through the use of force, the situation is likely to get worse. Khan seems “convinced that peace cannot be restored in Pakistan through continuing military operations”. I hope he is right. But he needs to appreciate the situation rather than situating the appreciation. That brings me to another point that Khan and his party stalwarts raise – ie, military operations have not been effective. Having witnessed many of these operations, I can assure Khan that the physical landscape of the tribal agencies and frontier regions today is very different from what it was in 2007 and 2008. The relevant point, however, is this: why has the physical dominance of these areas so far not entirely resulted in social-psychological and economic-fiscal dominance, which is the only way to successfully build the strategic triangle? The answer to that will not come by focussing merely on military operations or their perceived ineffectiveness but by asking the question of how and why other elements of national power could not be harnessed and employed to make use of the space that was created by military operations. Why, for instance, has the state not addressed the threat of reprisals that were to inevitably come in the urban centres and which required, and still do, the creation of effective counter-terrorism police units to work in collaboration with a capable police force? Formulating a strategy requires, foremost, a full evaluation of the responses available to the state and answering the question of whether the state, in fact, has utilised them. In our case, that has not happened. There’s much else that can be debated in Khan’s article but there’s never enough space. He keeps comparing situations – like Ireland – with the one we have here when they were/are strategically, historically and ideologically very different. Even in the case of Sri Lanka, while most of us know about and refer to the Tamil problem, no one seems to know or remember another problem, much more like ours: Sinhala extremism by the JVP. In any case, the examples he gives either refer to foreign occupations or to secessionist movements. Pakistan is neither in illegal occupation of its territories nor is the TTP a secessionist force. Finally, his defence of the proposal to open a TTP office by using the term ‘stakeholders’ in the resolution that came out of the government-sponsored conference is at best naïve, at worst, dangerous. The TTP is not a legitimate stakeholder in power-sharing like perhaps the Afghan Taliban whose office Khan keeps referring to and who are, again, fighting combined armies of states foreign to Afghanistan. Talking to the TTP, therefore, is meant – or should mean – for the state to reassert its authority, not accept the legitimacy of the TTP’s criminal actions. Offering the TTP an office, even before determining the bargaining zone and establishing the state’s maximum reservation point, is to reverse the order of negotiation theory. I understand Khan’s frustration. I don’t doubt his sincerity. But he must understand the complexity of what’s happening and why. (I wish it were as simple as a mere reaction to drone strikes, which is another topic altogether.) Even more, he should know that we are in this for the long haul.