news details |
|
|
| Afpak: Homegrown Enemy | | |
KANWAL SIBAL
President Barack Obama’s policy statement of March 27 on the United States of America’s new ‘Afpak’ strategy is problematic for India in many ways. Any strategy must also meet India’s long-term needs. Obama’s political need to seek a second term without being mired in Afghanistan should be subordinated to the larger security needs of the region. If the Americans want international support for their new strategy, including that of India, Russia and Iran, then the diagnosis of the problem and the remedy proposed should have broad understanding and acceptance.
Obama singles out al Qaida as the biggest threat to the security of the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is not persuasive. Bush believed that he had al Qaida on the run. In his time, some top al Qaida operatives were eliminated. Pakistan claims it has delivered almost 700 al Qaida rank and file to the Americans. Yet, the organization seems to have made a spectacular comeback, seriously imperilling, according to Obama, not only the region’s safety but also that of the world’s most powerful and technologically advanced country — this despite the isolation of its depleted leadership in mountain redoubts and the ‘radio silence’ it must observe to avoid detection and flushing out by the Americans.
This threat has developed even though US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces are operating in Afghanistan, the Hamid Karzai government receives international support and Pakistan has been, for several years, a frontline American ally in the war on terror. The argument that Bush got unnecessarily embroiled in Iraq and therefore neglected Afghanistan is only partially convincing. He evidently reasoned that al Qaida had been incapacitated sufficiently for it to be an immediately threatening force. If it has now resurfaced, ostensibly with such potency, what is the explanation? One answer is that Obama has deliberately dramatized the threat for domestic political reasons. He needs public support for committing additional human and material resources to the war in Afghanistan at a time when the US economy is in deep recession. The US public, he knows, would be more receptive if he conjured up a renewed threat from al Qaida in Afghanistan rather than if he offered a more accurate picture of the problem the US faces.
Al Qaida, a disparate organization with no specific national base, is like a parasite that needs a host to survive. It can operate effectively only in a supportive environment. It installed itself in this region because it was awash with jihadi ideology promoted knowingly to combat the Soviets in Afghanistan, with full Pakistani connivance. After the Soviets departed, the Pakistanis sponsored the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, intending to control the country through them and acquire the long-aspired-for strategic depth against India. The Pakistanis argue that the US introduced jihad to the region but abandoned it after the objective of forcing the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was achieved, saddling Pakistan with the mujahedin groups and millions of Afghan refugees. The Taliban, according to the fiction they now propagate, emerged from refugee camps spontaneously in order to end the civil war ravaging Afghanistan and stabilize it under their orthodox rule. The reality is different: the Inter-Services Intelligence armed and aided the Taliban takeover, Pakistan recognized the Taliban government along with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and, with the US engaging this obscurantist force for geo-economic reasons in the 1990s, almost succeeded in realizing its geo-political ambitions in Afghanistan. September 11, however, dramatically altered the situation, leading ultimately to US military action to oust the Taliban, along with the baggage of al Qaida leaders that they obstinately refused to abandon. The Pakistani strategy in Afghanistan went awry because al Qaida, sheltered by the fundamentalist religious forces Pakistan had knowingly nurtured and which the US was willing to do business with, staged massive terrorist attacks against prime US targets in 2001.
Al Qaida’s presence in the region is a by-product of the lurch towards Islamism in Pakistan in Zia-ul-Haq’s time, including the moulding of the ethos of its armed forces in that direction. The culpability of governments that followed, including that of General Pervez Musharraf, in creating space within the country with internal and external motives for extremist religious groups and politically legitimizing their activity should not be overlooked. The Pakistan establishment has been confident about its ability to control these organizations, until the contradictions between the conduct of the US war in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s equivocal policies towards its strategic assets there became increasingly unmanageable, with the extremists groups turning against the Pakistan government for fighting fellow Muslims on behalf of the Americans. With widespread terrorist attacks in the heartland of Pakistan, apprehensions of the Talibanization of Pakistan itself are growing. This is the fruit of the decades-long complicity of the Pakistani establishment in the mushrooming of extremist religious groups in Pakistan and the use of terror as State policy.
The strategy Pakistan followed on its western frontier by unleashing the Taliban against Afghanistan, it followed on its eastern frontier with India by nurturing and unleashing jihadi groups to destabilize Kashmir. The nexus between the two was exposed when US military strikes on terrorist training camps on Afghan soil post-September 11 also killed Kashmiri terrorists. The conduct of the Taliban in the IC-184 episode in December 1999 and the protection given to the hijackers by the Taliban and the Pakistani authorities underline the dangers for India in having malevolent extremist religious groups consolidating themselves in its neighbourhood. Pakistan’s reluctance to deal unequivocally with those responsible for the Mumbai terrorist attack illustrates that the real ailment in the region is not al Qaida but the jihadi groups wedded to radical Islam, long nurtured by Pakistan for achieving its strategic goals in India and in Afghanistan.
Obama did not mention the words ‘jihad’ and ‘radical Islam’ in his March 27 policy statement, studiously ignoring the motivating force behind terrorism that threatens India, the US and others. Reaching out to the Taliban with an exit strategy in mind only gives this destructive force space and legitimacy. Accommodating the Taliban in Afghanistan may wean them away from hostility towards the US, but not towards India, as that would not serve Pakistan’s interests. By making overtures to the Taliban, both their ideology and Pakistan’s use of it for its regional ambitions are given sustenance, and regional security is jeopardized. Distinguishing between the Afghani and the Pakistani Taliban is a recipe for policy confusion. Pakistan’s conduct in Swat and its fallout in Buner have provoked the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, to fulminate against its feeble response to the “mortal danger” the extremists pose to world security.
This frustration with Pakistan, despite all the levers of pressure at its command, exposes the contradictions of the US’s own policy towards the Taliban and Pakistan. The US should review its stultifying policy of rewarding Pakistan upfront with massive economic and military aid. For the US special representative, Richard Holbrooke, to say that for the first time since Partition, the US, India and Pakistan are facing terrorism as their common enemy is to absolve Pakistan of its culpability in promoting terrorism in the region, to ignore its terrorist assaults on India, to disregard the source of Indian insecurity and yet have us support a strategy that threatens to compound our problems in the future.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
