Pakistan’s military leaders have had a propensity for adventure unmatched by other dependent states in the modern age. Irrespective of the rights or wrong of the issue, Pakistani army generals provoked military conflict with India in 1965, 1971 and 1999. In the process, Pakistan has had to sign unequal ceasefires (Tashkent), submit to humiliating surrenders (Bangla Desh) or accept forced withdrawals (Kargil).
It was, however, General Zia ul Haq who believed that Pakistan was in a win win situation in Afghanistan. But he was wrong. If the legacy of the various wars with India is a reinforcement of historical pride and prejudice, the legacy of our “involvement” in Afghanistan is even more pervasive and poisonous. It has derailed the post cold war impulse for political democracy, created the demon of bloody sectarianism, raised the spectre of violent fundamentalism, stamped a militaristic ethos on society and created a powerful but unaccountable state within the state.
The ISI’s writ has spread far and wide, at home and abroad. Indeed, in recent times, an unprecedented and worrying development had begun to manifest itself with senior ISI operatives being invited as a matter of state policy into the precincts of GHQ and civilian government and also slotted into senior command positions in the army and vice versa. This was in sharp contrast to the situation before our involvement in Afghanistan when no more than Brigadiers ran the ISI and army chiefs tended to frown upon overly active roles for former ISI-types in regular army matters. Thus the ISI was actually poised to become a state in itself and for itself if the Afghanistan debacle hadn’t compelled General Musharraf to rein it in and freeze its more adventurous external operations.
Clearly, the ISI’s twenty-year “adventure” in Afghanistan is the worst thing to happen to Pakistan’s state and society in fifty years of independence. One dismal but stark manifestation of this fact is that our army now has to defend not just our eastern borders with India as part of an old historical reality but also our western border with Afghanistan as part of a new self-inflicted injury. Latest reports say that we have been obliged to move over 50,000 soldiers and 150,000 para-military troops to the border with Afghanistan in order to stop infiltration of Al-Qaeda terrorists into our tribal areas. And we are being obliged to do this in a security environment in which India is threatening to overrun our borders in hot pursuit of “terrorists” allegedly trained and supported by us while the international community is clucking in sympathy with its plight.
If there is a silver lining in the cloud, could it be, ironically enough, General Musharraf? Here is a man who has acted decisively and courageously to win international support for Pakistan’s ailing economy by swiftly abandoning a thoroughly bad foreign policy in Afghanistan. He has also held out an olive branch to India by showing flexibility on Kashmir, even though India hasn’t yet had the sense to recognize the true value of his initiative. He has reined in the ISI by suitable postings, transfers and retirements. He has shunted intractably rigid-types from GHQ. And he has risked the wrath of the religious extremists by clamping down on them in the national interest. This is a great start in the right direction. But much more needs to be done to reverse the tide.
Let us admit it. After Afghanistan, our biggest foreign policy failure is in Kashmir. From 1947 to 1965, we beseeched the UN to grant us Kashmir in vain. We then tried to stir revolt in the valley and triggered a destabilizing war with India. After 1971, we buried the Kashmir issue at Simla and forgot about the UN resolutions abroad. We then woke up in the 1990s to foment trouble in Kashmir after New Delhi had made a mess of things in the 1980s. In the last ten years, we have exported Islamic revolution to Kashmir and provoked untold brutalities on the Kashmiris by India’s security forces. In exchange, we have paid the price of urban terrorism in Karachi and elsewhere sponsored by India. We have undermined civil society and democratic pluralism by relinquishing political space to extremist jehadi organizations. We have piled up debt in order to fuel the cold war with India and scared away potential foreign investors. And we have pulled the rug from under the feet of elected political representatives who dared to think of smoking the peace pipe with New Delhi. Now we are being pushed into a conflict with India by the very extremists who have already dashed our hopes in Afghanistan. Isn’t it time to change a policy of perennial warring with India into a policy of enduring peace with our neighbours?
We have barely managed to survive a highly destablising debacle in Afghanistan whose end is not yet in sight. But we might not be so lucky in the event of a conflict with India over Kashmir. Putting Pakistan first means doing it not just vis-á-vis Afghanistan policy but also vis a vis Kashmir policy. Nothing less than that will constitute a safe and secure fresh start for the country.