General pervez musharraf’s recent trip to Russia has been billed as “historic” by the usual Foreign Office suspects. But, for once, they are right.
He is the first Pakistani leader ever to have been invited for a friendly state visit to Moscow. That is why, even though the trip was more symbolic than substantive, it is historic enough.
With hindsight, however, we can also say that the visit was fifty years overdue. If, after independence, we had been more “neutral” like India, we might have escaped the crippling dependence on the United States that has shaped, some might say “warped”, our history as a neo-colonial “front line state”. Indeed, “neutrality” might have prohibited the rise of the military as the sole custodian and determinant of our “national security”, strengthened democracy, and made peace, rather than war, the natural state of being with our neighbour to the east.
The remarkable thing is that even after the value of our other “friendships”, like that with anti-America, communist China, was amply demonstrated, our leaders failed to apply the lesson and carve an opening to Moscow until now. Worse, prodded by the us, our military leaders sanctioned a proxy war with Moscow in the 1980s whose crippling legacy of Islamic fundamentalism, radical sectarianism, drugs and Kalashnikovs has come to haunt our new generations.
An opportune moment to redress the imbalance arose in 1987 when Moscow went to Geneva to negotiate an accord for an orderly retreat from Kabul. Alas. The civilian prime minister, Mohammad Khan Junejo, who lent a shoulder to the Geneva Accords over the head of the military dictator General Zia ul Haq, and who might conceivably have opened up Moscow to Pakistan just as za Bhutto had opened up China before him, was pre-emptively sacked for displaying such foresight.
By 1989, discerning political analysts could conclude that the old ussr was coming apart and the Cold War was sputtering out. Having quit Afghanistan in 1987, the us was already packing its bags in Pakistan. That was a good time to start the “patching-up” process not just with the new Moscow but also with the old New Delhi.
But a band of military adventurers had other ideas. They wanted to conquer Afghanistan, dominate Central Asia and carve a green crescent from Turkey to Chechnya. Accordingly, a doctrine of “strategic depth” in the west and low-intensity warfare in the east was fashioned with the arrival of the Taliban in Kabul and the jihadi lashkars in Kashmir.
However, on two occasions at least, civilian prime ministers woke up to the exorbitant costs of this doctrine and tried to change course. But they were painted as “national security risks” and swiftly despatched.
In 1989, Benazir Bhutto sought to rein in the erstwhile conqueror of Jalalabad, General Hameed Gul, and tie the peace knot with India’s Rajiv Gandhi. But she was tarred by the brush of un-patriotism and sacked for her concerns.
Then Nawaz Sharif tried it in 1997 with ik Gujral but he was pushed into tit-for-tat nuclear tests by the military. When he persisted, he was prodded into Kargil in 1999 and destabilised. “Our boys” thought the Lahore Summit was a total “sell-out”.
In the next two years, the Pakistani nexus with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the freedom fighting jihadis in Kashmir increased manifold, even as the blowback of sectarian warfare and the rise of the religious right began to endanger the country.
Then came 9/11.
Confronted by Washington, General Musharraf wisely about-turned on our Afghan policy. And since the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Afghan Mujahideen and Kashmiri jihadis were all cut from the same anti-Western cloth, it was time to start thinking of how to wrap up our pro-active Kashmir policy before it ended undermining dividends reaped from abandoning the Afghan policy. But unfortunately, that hasn’t happened.
It takes two hands to clap. Devising new foreign policies requires enabling environments both at home and abroad. Thus a suitable new Afghan policy still awaits appropriate ethnic input by the us in Kabul. Equally, unless India is amenable to a fruitful dialogue, the diplomatic “flexibility” shown by General Musharraf since January 2002 will remain in vain.
This is where Moscow assumes relevance. Pakistan seems to be encircled by many Russian “friends”: a hostile Northern Alliance government in Afghanistan, suspicious Central Asian states in the north, an uncooperative Iran in the west and a deadly India on the east. But if Moscow were a little less tilted against Pakistan, Islamabad could make necessary adjustments to its foreign policy in the region without too much upheaval.
Here is the dilemma. If India is agreeable to a realistic dialogue, perhaps peace can be negotiated without redrawing boundaries. Similarly, if Kabul is able to co-opt representative Pakhtun elements, al-Qaeda can be swiftly mopped up. But in the absence of progress on either front, the proposed Pakistani agenda can be derailed by rogue elements inside the state and non-state actors outside it.
The emergence of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan and the fiery insistence of the Kashmir jihadis that they are readying to carry the war from Srinagar to New Delhi are manifestations of General Musharraf’s nagging problem.