The Friday Times, Najam Sethi’s Editorial
The military strategists of America who want to “save” Afghanistan from their Al-Qaeda enemy and the military establishment of Pakistan which wants to “secure” Afghanistan for its Taliban “assets”, have both got it tragically wrong. If they insist on having it their exclusive way, they will lose both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Consider.
America’s strategy in the run-up to the Afghan end-game is inconsistent and contradictory. Ten years after 9/11, with $1 trillion down the drain, Afghan “nationhood” is out, counter-insurgency is being substituted with counter-terrorism, troop surges with troop draw downs, and not all good Taliban are dead ones. So key Taliban leaders have to be targeted by drones in order to soften up their resistance and make them amenable to a US-sponsored power-sharing arrangement in Kabul. But this strategic direction-change is tripping up for two reasons.
First, the post-2014 “Base-Afghanistan” envisioned by Washington is critically based on two factors which are eroding faster than they are being consolidated. The first is the failure to build a reliable Afghan National Army that can do America’s bidding – Taliban infiltration has made it an unreliable future adjunct. The second is America’s inability to create a viable puppet regime of strongmen that can capture space and sustain stability – as testified by the assassination of the police head of Northern Afghanistan, General Dawood Dawood, two months ago, and that of Hamid Karzai’s powerful, alliance-building brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, this week, followed by the abortive attempt on the life of the Home Minister, Bismillah Mohammadi, the same day. America’s man in Kabul, Hamid Karzai, has never been more vulnerable as he is now.
The second is a continuing failure to persuade Pakistan’s defense establishment to help knock out the core Al-Qaeda-Taliban trouble-makers in FATA. A carrot-and-stick policy that is based on “peanuts-for-aid” ($800 million for Pakistan in the last two years out of $3 billion pledged, as compared to $200 billion spent in Afghanistan in the same period) and largely ignores or denies Pakistan’s legitimate security concerns in post-America Afghanistan (the need for a stable if not fully “friendly” Afghanistan on its western border) has failed to deliver. American unaccountability and unilateralism has fueled anti-Americanism in Pakistan following the Raymond Davis affair, the OBL raid in Abbottabad and the surge in drone strikes in FATA, putting the Pakistani military on the spot in the public eye. Now American impatience and arrogance – the attack on the ISI (publicly blamed for journalist Saleem Shahzad’s murder) and its chief General Pasha (“sack him”, says the New York Times) – and the decision to formally “announce” a “suspension” in $800 million in overdue US aid and compensation for the Pakistan military’s big effort against the Pakistani Taliban, has added insult to injury.
Pakistan’s strategy of continuing to obsess about India and making it an element of the future Afghan matrix on the basis of its Taliban “assets” is also coming a cropper. These Taliban “assets” were problematic even during Mullah Umar’s reign from 1996-2001 when they refused to recognize the Durand Line as the international border with Pakistan, refused to kick out radical Islamic sectarian elements belonging to the Sipah Sahaba and Lashkar Jhangvi, and refused to break relations with Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda even though they were plotting against both America and Pakistan. These same Afghan Taliban “assets” have since networked with Al-Qaeda in FATA to give birth to and sustain the Pakistani Tehreek-i-Taliban which has exacted a toll of 35,000 Pakistan civilians and over 3000 Pakistani soldiers in Swat and South Waziristan in the last two years. As the murdered journalist and insider, Saleem Shahzad, noted, the real aim of the Al-Qaeda-Taliban network is to infiltrate the Pakistani state, plunge it into conflict with India (new Mumbais), erode the army’s fighting capacity by de-motivating its rank and file, seize control of its nuclear weapons and transform its territory as a base area for world Islamic revolution. On the basis of Mullah Umar’s past record, the Haqqani network’s current liaison with Al-Qaeda, and Al-Qaeda’s future ambitions, the Pakistan military’s rigid protection of such assets is souring its longer term “strategic” relationship with the international community in general and America in particular. This is something it can ill-afford, given its trade and aid dependency on the West.
Pakistan and America should put their interests and concerns squarely on the table and abstain from airing their political differences or applying countervailing pressures through the media. America’s carrot-and-stick policy won’t yield dividends with Pakistan just as Pakistan’s “double-game” breaches the trust red-line and mocks its “strategic” relations with America. Washington’s plans for Afghanistan must not exclude Mullah Umar and the Haqqani network just as Islamabad’s plans must not be exclusively based on them. In fact, America and Pakistan must not stake their all on the end-game in Afghanistan because its final outcome holds no guarantees for either of them.