Pakistan - Credulous fools?

• Dr Mohammad Taqi

In 2001 the US bungled a chance at peace and this time around it may botch the 13 years of military effort that went into neutralising the Taliban

“Work on, my medicine, work!

Thus credulous fools are caught” — Shakespeare’s Othello.

Two retired Pakistani generals spoke last week pretty much reconfirming what is widely believed about the security establishment’s duplicitous policies in the post-9/11 period. That one of them, General Asad Durrani, served as the Director General (DG) of the Inter-services Intelligence (ISI) in the early 1990s and the other, General Pervez Musharraf, the military dictator in the years preceding and after 9/11, makes them especially interesting revelations. According to the news portal Politico.com, speaking at an Al-Jazeera forum, “The former spy chief, Lt. Gen. Asad Durrani, said it was ‘more probable’ than not that his country’s government knew of the late al Qaeda leader’s location, speculating that ‘the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo.’” General Musharraf told a private television channel that, since 1989, Pakistan has had a policy and strategy to support militancy in Kashmir to force India into negotiations. In response to a question on why his regime signed an agreement in 2006 with the Haqqani network, General Musharraf said that as India was (allegedly) “stabbing” Pakistan in Balochistan and the Frontier through Afghanistan, he decided to find someone who could stab them back. Musharraf said, “Do you know that Jalaluddin Haqqani was a hero for the US...we thought we could bring peace to the region through him.”

Both former generals love to talk but such candid admissions are quite incredible even by their loose lipped standards. Musharraf effectively owned that Pakistan was using jihadist proxies across the Durand Line in the west and the Line of Control (LoC) in the east to achieve its foreign policy objectives. General Durrani’s assertion — more accurately a speculation perhaps — flies in the face of what Pakistani officials, including Musharraf, have been telling the world, i.e. they had absolutely no clue how Osama bin Laden ended up within a stone’s throw of the Pakistan Military Academy, Abbottabad. What is even more incredible is that the security establishment’s medicine seems to be working and the US policymakers are either being played like a fiddle or are willing to play along.

The White House spokesman, Eric Schultz, recently took pains to avoid calling the Afghan Taliban a terrorist outfit. When asked by the ABC news correspondent Jonathan Karl whether he thought that the Taliban is a terrorist group, Mr Schultz said, “I do not think that the Taliban is an armed insurgency. This was the winding down of the war in Afghanistan and that is why this arrangement (release of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl) was dealt.” Having vetoed the former Mr Hamid Karzai’s desire to accept the Taliban’s unilateral surrender offer on December 5, 2001 — the day he was chosen as the interim Afghan leader — the US seems to have come a full circle. In 2001 the US bungled a chance at peace and this time around it may botch the 13 years of military effort that went into neutralising the Taliban. The 2001 move would have obviated the need to deal with the Pakistani establishment to broker peace with the Taliban, something that Pakistan eventually used as a massive leverage against both Afghanistan and the US.

Former Pakistani ambassador to the US, Professor Husain Haqqani, notes in his book, Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States and an Epic History of Misunderstanding: “Chester Bowles, the American ambassador to India, offered a plausible explanation for the US decision-making in relation to Pakistan. He attributed American policy toward South Asia as the product of ‘sending important personages to this area who have no knowledge of the forces at work here’. Unfamiliar Americans, Bowles said, “come convinced that all Asians are ‘inscrutable’ products of the ‘inscrutable East’!” Not much seems to have changed since Ambassador Bowles, who served in Delhi under then President Dwight Eisenhower and then under President John F Kennedy, diagnosed the affliction: several US officials deployed to Afghanistan and South Asia were out of their depth.

In his recent memoir Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace, the former CIA chief, Mr Leon Panetta, writes, “(General Ahmed Shuja) Pasha was an intriguing, enigmatic figure who carried himself with a military bearing, perhaps the result of having served as a general in the Pakistani military before being handpicked by Ashfaq Kayani, then the chief of army staff and the most powerful man in Pakistan, to run ISI. Pasha understood English perfectly, though his spoken English was often halting and too soft to hear. Like others in the officer corps, he had a whiff of a British accent. I was impressed by his moderation, sense of history and worldliness. During dinner with President Asif Ali Zardari on my first visit to Pakistan, Pasha told me that the problem in western Pakistan stemmed from the replacement of the malik, the secular tribal leader, with the mullah, the religious authority. He inveighed against the number of madrassas in which poor Pakistani youth were being moulded, and yearned to draw his country into the future. Yet for all of Pasha’s charm and sincerity, what I did not know was how much he was willing to take on militants within his own country.” Mr Panetta got it wrong on so many levels. Firstly, General Pasha was not exactly his counterpart as the ISI, unlike the CIA, is not a civilian agency. Secondly, he was an active duty, not former, general and, lastly, he was not about to let the CIA boss in on the fact that over 200 of those maliks were killed just in North Waziristan by the jihadists with whom Musharraf had signed those agreements.

The US, however, has the luxury of being enamoured with local spooks and blundering as it can pack up and leave the region while the Afghans, Indians and, of course, Pakistanis will have to figure out the hard way whether the Taliban and other assorted jihadists are terrorists or mere “insurgents”. Musharraf is right in that the Haqqanis did receive — albeit through Pakistan — US arms and money to fight the Soviets. The CIA, however, did it on someone else’s soil while Musharraf and his ilk do it in Pakistan with an utter disregard for the blood-soaked blowback that inevitably ensues. The Pakistani security establishment may think that its medicine is working and the credulous fools are caught but perhaps the US exit strategy from the region is more a function of its geopolitical expediency than credulity. Unfortunately, the too clever by half gimmicks a la Musharraf portend nothing but more pain for the region.