Over 80,000 people have been killed in the conflict in Indian-Kashmir since 1989. Most were civilians. But many Pakistanis, too, went there to wage jihad in the misguided service of the state. The direct costs to us include a prohibitive arms race, two wars, dismemberment, and rout in Kargil which paved the way for military rule. If ever there was a litany of abject state foreign policy failure, this is it.
Our score on the western front is not better. Pakistan’s alliance with the US led us to create and nourish the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s, with horrendous consequences: two decades of forced “Islamisation” that eroded civil society, violated democracy and brainwashed two generations in a subterranean culture of hardline Deobandi “Islam”, violent sectarian strife, drugs and guns. It was also, inevitably, a precursor to the rise of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan which have sucked Pakistan into the eye of a global storm. As such, the multilateral conflict on our north-western border threatens a much more ominous blowback in the future than the bilateral Kashmir conflict on our eastern border with India ever did in the past.
Pakistan’s Afghan policy remains deeply flawed. After the demise of the USSR, Islamabad would have done well to broker a deal between the disparate Mujahidin and the orphaned Najibullah regime in which it could have fashioned a key role for itself in stabilizing Afghanistan and winning influence. Instead, Islamabad helped the Mujahideen overthrow the ancien regime and precipitated an ethnic civil war, warlordism and anarchy. Then Islamabad clutched at the Taliban in 1996 as “revolutionary saviors” and installed them in Kabul in 1997. But in 1998 Al Qaeda perceived Talibanised Afghanistan as a revolutionary “base area” for its global operations, moved in and shoved Pakistan aside. Thus, when Al-Qaeda struck on 9/11 and the Taliban refused to banish it despite pressure from Islamabad, Pakistan arrived at the brink of becoming the biggest loser in the great game for Afghanistan.
General Musharraf took the right decision to join the international war against Al-Qaeda. But he failed to grasp the necessity of a complete political and military elimination of the Taliban as a corollary of the war against Al-Qaeda. In the event, even as the military selectively targeted Al-Qaeda in Pakistan, it allowed the Taliban to retrench themselves in the tribal borderlands and politicize these areas. Worse, in a blithely opportunist move against mainstream national parties, General Musharraf made alliances with pro-Taliban and pro-Al-Qaeda religious parties in Pakistan, ensuring that with only 11 per cent of the vote they were able to capture 25% of the federal parliament as well as the provincial governments of the NWFP and Balochistan. Indeed, the JUI – the original source of the Deobandi madrassahs that continue to spawn the Taliban – was so exalted that its leader, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, was given a ringside seat in the National Security Council. In return, the MMA facilitated General Musharraf as President and Army Chief until 2007.
This grave strategic error led to the creation of a powerful nexus between foreign Al-Qaeda, Afghan Taliban and Pakistani religio-political elements in FATA, NWFP and Balochistan. Therefore when General Musharraf tried to flush out Al-Qaeda from FATA in 2003-04, the army met with such fierce resistance from their local Talibanised “hosts” that it was compelled to sue for “peace deals” which have only served to strengthen foreign and local Taliban. Worse, a legal and political environment in which they can flourish has been provided by the NWFP government after the promulgation of hardline Talibanised laws. That is why there is now overwhelming evidence that Taliban activity in Afghanistan has significantly increased after the recent peace accords were struck with them by Islamabad. In fact, Afghan and Pakistani Taliban have banded with remnants of the former Mujahideen (like Hekmatyar, who is close to the Jamaat i Islami) and Al-Qaeda to launch attacks on the Kabul regime.
The Pakistan military-security complex is playing with fire. It is gravely mistaken if it thinks that by buying “peace” with the Taliban and mullahs at home at the expense of the Karzai-NATO regime in Kabul, it can consolidate its power in Islamabad and steer Pakistan in the direction of a moderately enlightened and stable state. A defeat of the NATO-Karzai regime at the hands of pro-Al-Qaeda Taliban would inevitably lead to the entry into Afghanistan of other players like Iran, Russia and India and open it to the risk of prolonged ethnic warfare and eventual partition. But then a Pakhtun Taliban state in south Afghanistan that is blocked from pursuing its ambitions in the north by powers greater than Pakistan would inevitably look south across the Durand Line and covet areas of Pakistan’s Frontier and Balochistan to consolidate its “nationality-statehood”. And that would be disastrous for Pakistan.
General Musharraf is following an Afghan policy which – whether by military ambivalence or political opportunism or misplaced strategy or a combination of all – is spinning out of control. The concoction of passionate religion, fierce ethnicity and modern firepower in the tribal lands north of Islamabad is a sign of state failure followed by state disintegration.