Recent events in Pakistan make the need for evaluating our long-term strategic interests with some clarity, crucially important. There seem to be three distinct scenarios for Pakistan’s future emerging that one can discern – first is a descent into chaos where the Swat compromise is the first step which leads to a gradual talibanization of the country with the best and brightest of the civil society leaving the country to the mullahs and the wahabis. This leads to an Islamic state run by mullahs similar to that of Iran or Saudi Arabia and perhaps continues to be funded by them as well for geopolitical advantage. A second scenario has the military coming back to power with another version of Musharaff which continues to foment disorder in Kashmir, support the taliban in destabilizing Afghanistan (basically telling them to work outside the country as a deal much as the Saudis did with their madrassas and mullahs) and continues to hoodwink the international community for financial bailouts. Will it work it is difficult to know but presented a drastic choice of nuclear Armageddon and support them it might. A third scenario – based more on wishful thinking than any real political will – has the Pakistans civil society taking the law in their own hands much as the Philippines did in 1986 when they ousted Marcos and continued with a messy, raucous democratic experiment which has lasted till now. So the three scenarios seem like a choice between Pakistan turning into Afghanistan, Iran or Philippines! As Pakistan faces these choices, what should the Indian strategy be? Do we want a failed state on our doorstep or an Islamic military dictatorship or a stuttering democracy?
During the past few years Pakistan seems to have undergone a slow and bloody meltdown of which the latest compromise in Swat valley could be the beginning of the end of the state. Its president, Asif Zardari said as much stating that Pakistan was in danger of Talibanization if events were not handled well. The fact is that in less than eight months, Asif Ali Zardari's new government has effectively lost control of much of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) to the Taliban's Pakistani counterparts, a loose confederation of nationalists, Islamists, and angry Pashtun tribesmen under the nominal command of Baitullah Mehsud. Across much of the North-West Frontier Province—around a fifth of Pakistan—women have now been forced to wear the burqa, music has been silenced, barbershops are forbidden to shave beards, and over 140 girls' schools have been blown up or burned down. In the provincial capital of Peshawar, a significant proportion of the city's elite, along with its musicians, have now decamped to the relatively safe and tolerant confines of Lahore and Karachi. The recent deal, struck between the Pakistani government and a key figure in the Taliban, which allows, in exchange for an end to the internal fighting between the army and the rebels, the Taliban to set up a court system of Islamist, or sharia, law in the Swat Valley, an area of 1.3 million people—a majority of whom had voted for secular candidates in the most recent elections—just 100 miles from Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, could become a dangerous portent of things to come.
The defenders of this compromise argue that the key facts are that, at the moment, there is no working judicial system of any sort in the Swat Valley—and that the Taliban militias have routed the numerically superior Pakistani army in their armed confrontations. So the deal imposes national secular authority even more than it legitimizes sharia justice. Also the deal was made not with "the Taliban" as a whole—the term implies a more cohesive entity than actually exists—but rather, specifically, with Maulana Sufi Muhammad, whom the Pakistanis arrested two years ago for leading jihadist raids across the border into Afghanistan. He was released from prison after agreeing to give up the struggle and to work for peace. These defenders of the deal hope that he would strike a deal with his son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah, who is the deputy to a much more militant Taliban leader—or that, if he can't come to terms with his son-in-law, a wedge might be driven between various Islamist factions, peeling Sufi Muhammad and his followers away from the radicals and thus strengthening the hand of the central government.
Of course there is nothing wrong in principle with trying to negotiate deals with Taliban factions in order to split them or to set them up against each other. However, it's futile to go down that road with hard-core Taliban and secondly to the extent negotiations succeed with any faction, these need to be negotiated from a position of strength to be successful. The so called deal in Pakistan breaks both rules: Pakistan's political leaders are trying to craft a deal, indirectly, with the hard-core Taliban, and they're entering into it from a position of obvious weakness. This is why the deal is not only ill fated but potentially disastrous: It reveals the severe weakness of the Pakistani state. The politicians pursued the deal only because the state cannot control its own territory. Unless Sufi Muhammad can convince his son-in-law to accept peace and obeisance to secular authority in exchange for a parcel of land where Islamic law carries some weight, the deal is more likely to convince the militant Taliban simply to press on for more favors still, and the war will gradually spread to other parts of the country.
And the reason it will spread is that the two things that feed it – new jihadis and money – are still not under control. “ In order to have terrorists, in order to have supporters for terrorists, in order to have people who are willing to interpret religion in violent ways, in order to have people who are willing to legitimate crashing yourself into a building and killing 5,000 innocent people, you need particular interpretations of Islam. Those interpretations of Islam are being propagated out of schools that receive organizational and financial funding from Saudi Arabia”.( Vali Nasr). In April 2002, the former Pakistani Minister of Religious Affairs, put the number of madrassas at about 10,000, with 1.7 million students. Madrassas in Pakistan are financed either by voluntary charity, foreign entities, or governments. The Saudi Arabian organization, Harmain Islamic Foundation, reportedly has provided substantial financial assistance to the Ahle-Hadith madrassas, which have provided fighters to the banned Kashmiri militant group Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LET). The fact is that there seems to be no clear identification of the number of madrassas or their sources of funding – both of which need to be controlled if there is to be any long term success in combating terrorism.
A critical element in how the chaos scenario plays out in Pakistan will also be the role of the civil society. Will they organize themselves against this Talibanization of their country as they did when Musharaff tried to ram through an unconstitutional effort to perpetuate his hold on the country or will they rationalize away the Swat compromise as a necessary but evil concession? In a recent interview with Farid Zakaria, Imran Khan seemed to suggest the latter, blaming Zardari but never challenging the Jihadi movement or the pernicious underpinnings of the Swat compromise. The role and attitude of the civil society in Pakistan will be the ultimate determinant of the future of the country. The issue is will they have the foresight to recognize the critical role they can play at this juncture in history with a fledgling democracy still struggling to counter internal fundamentalism and in recognizing that in compromising on fundamentals they may have bargained away their fundamental rights as a country.
Of course the critical issue in Pakistan, has always been and still remains, is the role of the military and its relationship with the constitutional head of the country. The problem is that Zardari does not control the military or the ISI who bear much of the burden of Pakistan’s descent into chaos. As Ahmad Rashid points out “ for more than twenty years, the ISI has, for its own purposes, deliberately and consistently funded and incubated a variety of Islamist groups, including in particular Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba. Since the days of the anti-Soviet Mujahideen, the Pakistani army saw the jihadis as an ingenious and cost-effective means of both dominating Afghanistan—something they finally achieved with the retreat of the Soviets in 1987—and bogging down the Indian army in Kashmir—something they succeeded in achieving from 1990 onward”. Rashid believes that “every Pakistani general, liberal or religious, believed in the jihadists by 1999, not from personal Islamic conviction, in most cases, but because the jihadists had proved themselves over many years as the one force able to frighten, flummox, and bog down the Hindu-dominated Indian army. .. many in the army still believe that the jihadis make up a more practical defense against Indian dominance than even nuclear weapons. For them, supporting a range of jihadi groups in Afghanistan and Kashmir is not an ideological or religious whim so much as a practical and patriotic imperative—a vital survival strategy for a Pakistani state that they perceive to be threatened by India's ever-growing power and its alliance with the hostile Karzai regime in Kabul”.
In the long term, according to several observers, the following factors will determine the region’s future: “South and Central Asia will not see stability unless there is a new global compact among the leading players...to help this region solve its problems, which range from settling the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan to funding a massive education and job-creation program in the borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan and along their borders with Central Asia…The second factor, of course, has to be reform of the ISI and the Pakistani military. The top Pakistani army officers must end their obsession with bleeding India by using an Islamic strategic doctrine entailing support of jihadists, and realize that such a policy is deeply damaging to Pakistan itself, threatening to turn Pakistan into a clone of Taliban-dominated Afghanistan rather than a potential partner of a future Indian superpower. A third factor is somehow finding a way to stop the madrasa- inspired and Saudi-financed advance of Wahhabi Islam, which is directly linked to the spread of anti-Western radicalization. “ A fourth element will be the role civil society will play in defending the fundamentals of their state.
India today seems to lack a strategy in regard to Pakistan that is clearly enunciated which enjoys broad public acceptance. A public debate on this is long overdue.
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