US Senator John McCain is the fourth top American official to descend on Islamabad in one week on the heels of Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman US Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, Miss Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, and Mr Richard Boucher, US assistant secretary of state for South Asia. Their joint message is that there is “incontrovertible” evidence of the “definite involvement” of Pakistan-based jihadi groups in general and the Lashkar-e-Tayba in particular in the terrorist attack on Mumbai. If the government of Pakistan does not take “credible action” against the actors involved, says Senator McCain, India will be constrained to lash out with the implicit “understanding” of the international community. Apparently, the Indians and Americans will not be satisfied by the sort of “sham action” taken by General Pervez Musharraf after the jihadi attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001 when scores of workers and activists of hard-line religious parties and groups were hauled up in a great public show of “will” by the state and then quietly released over a period of months. “The cat and mouse game played by Pakistan and America during the Musharraf-Bush years won’t work any more”, said Senator McCain.
This statement puts paid to the position adopted by President Zardari that no such credible evidence has been shown to Pakistan so far. What he means is that the government of Pakistan is not willing or able to act against the non-state actors identified by New Delhi and Washington. Unfortunately, however, Pakistan’s position is weak for several reasons. First, many local jihadi and sectarian groups make no secret of their continuing hostility towards “Hindu India”. Indeed, some flaunt it openly in their magazines, pamphlets and public sermons and declarations. For example, Masood Azhar, the leader of the Jaish-e-Mohammad, actually took credit publicly for the attack on the Indian parliament in 2001 until he was told by his agency handlers to shut up and disappear. Second, President Zardari’s recent statement that “non-state actors want a war between Pakistan and India” is an admission of culpability since most non-state actors of repute in the region are based in Pakistan in pursuit of the Pakistani military’s national security objectives in the region. Third, the contradictory position adopted by Pakistanis on the issue of “Islamist terrorism” is evidence of guilt in the eyes of the world. For instance, we cannot say that neo-con America carried out the 9/11 attacks in order to create a pretext to attack Iraq and Afghanistan, and also claim in the same breath that “America had it coming” because of its imperialist and unjust policies in the Muslim world. In the case of 9/11, the remarkable thing is that both Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri have proudly and publicly “owned” the attack not once but several times even as most Pakistanis fervently insist that they didn’t do it! In the case of India, the incompetence of its police and security services is excuse enough for most Pakistanis to make the contradictory claim that no Pakistani non-state actor was involved because such sophistication and audacity could only have been manufactured internally by the Indian intelligence services in their devious agenda to break up Pakistan. Of course, the Indian media’s outraged rush to judgment had many holes in it but this is not reason enough for its Pakistani counterpart to build self-righteous edifices of innocence.
What are the options for Pakistan, India and the US-led international community in the wake of the Mumbai attacks? The options for all except Pakistan are laid down by their democratically elected respective governments. There are two reasons for this. (1) There are no armed non-state actors there (2) The military there has no autonomy and obeys the democratically elected civilian government of the day. But in Pakistan’s case, this is not so. Our military IS the state and not just an organ of the state; our military fashions national security policy; and our civilian leaders and regimes can challenge its supremacy only at their own peril, as we saw in the 1990s, and again recently when the Zardari government tried to wrest control of the political wing of the ISI from the military. In the current situation, Pakistan’s military doesn’t want to hold any non-state actors accountable for the Mumbai attacks and the Zardari government cannot do anything about it, whatever the evidence.
A glimpse into the military’s position was recently afforded when un-named military officials told the media that in the event of a war with India the Pakistani army would be withdrawn from the tribal areas and rushed to the eastern front while the “patriotic Taliban” would be welcomed to assist the national effort. This amounts to saying that the “war against terror” in the tribal areas is not Pakistan’s war, despite the civilian government’s ownership of it as “Pakistan’s war”.
Therefore concerned Pakistanis should have no illusions about Pakistan’s ominous descent into chaos. This is reckless thinking on the part of Pakistan’s civil-military leadership. It should be concerned about getting the state to function properly and Pakistanis to prosper instead of showing wounded pride and misplaced self-righteousness. International censure, sanctions and isolation are the first steps on the way to being declared a rogue state and dealt with accordingly.