Bob Woodward’s new book, “Obama’s wars” has created a stir in Pakistan. Its message is loud and clear: the US-Pak “strategic relationship” could get unstuck or even unravel dangerously if the American mission in Afghanistan is thwarted, or if there is a terrorist strike in the US whose footsteps can be traced to Pakistan. General Jim Jones, the National Security Advisor who resigned recently, is quoted as telling President Asif Zardari: “ The president [Obama] would be forced to do things that Pakistan would not like… No one will be able to stop the response and consequences. This is not a threat, just a statement of political fact .” Apparently, in such an event, the US has drawn up plans to bomb 150 “terrorist centers” in Pakistan. Considering the Pakistani response to the recent cross border incident when US choppers strayed into Waziristan and accidentally mowed down three Pakistani paratroopers – nearly 100 NATO container-trucks were burnt down and the supply line from Karachi to Afghanistan (which indispensably accounts for 75 per cent of all American supplies to its troops in Afghanistan) was shut down for ten days in Pakistan – the blowback of an American attack on Pakistan would be cataclysmic for the region.
President Obama says: “ Afghanistan is inextricably linked to our partnership with Pakistan. We’re in Afghanistan to prevent a cancer from once again spreading through that country. But this same cancer has also taken root in the border region of Pakistan. ” This is supplemented by the prevailing view in the American intelligence community noted by Woodward: “ Afghanistan would not get straightened out until there was a stable relationship between Pakistan and India. A more mature and less combustible relationship between the two long time adversaries was more important than building Afghanistan ”. Apparently, General Jones thought that “[General Ashfaq ]Kayani had the power to deliver, but he refused to do much… The bottom line was depressing: This had been a charade .” Indeed, when he told General Kayani the clock was ticking, “ Kayani would not budge…he had other concerns . ‘I’ll be the first to admit, I’m India-centric ,’” said General Kayani.
It may be noted that General Kayani has reversed former President General Pervez Musharraf’s normalization process with India. Indeed, far from searching for out-of-the box solutions to Kashmir like his predecessor, General Kayani has ordered the foreign office to revert to Pakistan’s old UN position of a plebiscite on Kashmir. More critically, he has committed Pakistan to an arms race with India by announcing that “it is India’s military capability and not its intentions at any time that matter in the final analysis”.
Finally, according to Woodward, “ General Jones and his staff debated … the chief problem was Pakistan – Zardari’s political vulnerability, the continuing dominance of the country’s military-intelligence complex, its nuclear weapons, the persistent presence of al-Qaeda training camps in the ungoverned regions, and the possibility of a misstep with the CIA drone attacks that could dramatically shift the political calculus .”
So there we have it. The US thinks that the Pakistan army’s obsession with India, its dysfunctional civilian government and its anti-American society are standing in the way of conflict resolution. The irony is that all three elements of state and society in Pakistan are desperately hooked on US aid and hardware. Any major disruption in this “strategic relationship” by witting or unwitting state or non-state actors on either side could unleash havoc in Pakistan by triggering civil unrest, separatism and foreign intervention.
The former US ambassador to Pakistan, Ryan Crocker, made a perceptive analysis recently of President Obama’s view that the “cancer is in Pakistan”. Mr Crocker suggests that the U.S. should not carry out cross-border military actions and any talks between the U.S. or Afghanistan and the Taliban must be transparent to the Pakistanis. “Given its rivalry with India and its organic disunity, which dates back to its founding, Pakistan fears for its basic survival… The country has always had a difficult relationship with Afghanistan, not least because in the 19th century the British deliberately drew the Pakistani-Afghan border, the so-called Durand Line, in order to divide the Pashtun people. ”
The two critical words here for Pakistan’s consideration are “organic disunity” and “fear for its basic survival”. The first is palpable enough: Pakistan’s nation, state and society are more fissured today than ever before. But the second factor is a consequence of the first factor rather than a cause of it. The irony is that if fear of India was a real and relevant factor in the early years of Pakistan, since the 1960s it has been religiously “manufactured” and “consciously imagined” and propagated by the Pakistan army as a dominant element of the national security narrative in Pakistan. Herein lies the basic fallacy at the heart of the Af-Pak debate in which it is claimed that “Pakistan’s insecurity viz India compels it to stake a major role in Afghanistan”. In fact, it is the Pakistan army’s corporate and political ambitions that propagate India as a “security threat” rather than the other way round. That is why an assertion of civilian supremacy over the military – through good governance, accountability and democracy rather than whimsical autocracy – would set Pakistan right in more ways than one.