EDITORIAL: The game is up
The joint session of parliament on May 13 was nothing short of a historic turning point in civil-military relations. The in-camera briefings given by the military top brass to the parliamentarians in order to explain what happened in the Abbottabad raid is a new precedent. Before this incident, it would have been unimaginable to think that the ISI chief could ever answer scathing questions from the politicians for many hours. In the face of trenchant criticism for their obliviousness to Osama bin Laden’s presence near a military academy, our armed forces finally decided to brief the parliamentarians. Only time will tell whether the decision to do this was a tactical retreat by the military or reflects a real mind change. One thing is clear though: the ‘game’ is up. Pakistan’s military cannot afford to play its usual double game anymore because the world’s, and particularly the US’s, patience has finally run out. Despite their denials and having confessed to incompetence and an intelligence failure, disbelief lingers that Osama was living in a compound near Kakul and yet no one in the army or the ISI was aware of his whereabouts.
US Senator John Kerry, who is considered a friend of Pakistan, made it clear during his visit to Afghanistan that the US will “consider all its options” if Taliban leader Mullah Omar is found to be present on Pakistani soil. “We obviously want a Pakistan that is prepared to respect the interests of Afghanistan, and to be a real ally in our efforts to combat terrorism,” said Senator Kerry ahead of his visit to Pakistan. Even though the Obama administration has so far maintained that Washington wants to keep working with Islamabad, there is strong resentment in the US at being manipulated by Pakistan since 9/11. “People who were prepared to listen to [Pakistan’s] story for a long time are no longer prepared to listen,” said a senior US official according to a report published in The Washington Post. This certainly points to tough times ahead for Pakistan. Many analysts had been warning the military of the repercussions of its dual policies and how the shelf life of such tactics had ended long ago but clearly no one in GHQ paid any heed to these warnings. Unless the military aligns its new policy with Pakistan’s, the region’s and the world’s best interests, there is no guarantee that our territorial integrity would not be violated again. It seems that the mindset of our military is set in stone but the only way to change is if all civilian political forces come together and stand up to their monopoly on policies critical to the survival and progress of Pakistan.
On Saturday, Mian Nawaz Sharif demanded that our intelligence agencies “should work within their constitutional ambit” instead of “subverting the constitution, toppling governments, running parallel administrations and strengthening one political party at the cost of others”. The PML-N chief opined that it was about time the foreign policy should be formulated by the civilian democratic government and demanded that the army and intelligence agencies’ budgets should be presented in the National Assembly. There is merit in Mr Sharif’s demands. The PPP and its coalition partners should avail this historic opportunity of tilting the balance of power in favour of civilians. The PPP should not make the same mistake as their leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who wasted a golden chance to trim the military’s power back in 1971. Civilian supremacy will not only set our future in the right direction but will help improve Pak-US relations as well. The military’s game is over bar the shouting; our politicians must take charge now. *
To say that our security czars and assorted knights have been caught with their pants down would be the understatement of the century. This is the mother of all embarrassments, showing us either to be incompetent – it can’t get any worse than this, Osama living in a sprawling compound a short walk from that nursery school of the army, the Pakistan Military Academy and, if we are to believe this, our ever-vigilant eyes and ears knowing nothing about it – or, heaven forbid, complicit.
I would settle for incompetence anytime because the implications of complicity are too dreadful to contemplate.
And the Americans came, swooping over the mountains, right into the heart of the compound, and after carrying out their operation flew away into the moonless night without our formidable guardians of national security knowing anything about it. This is to pour salt over our wounds. The obvious question which even a child would raise is that if a cantonment crawling with the army such as Abbottabad is not safe from stealthy assault what does it say about the safety of our famous nuke capability, the mainstay of national pride and defence?
Barely 24 hours before the Osama assault General Kayani, at a ceremony in General Headquarters in remembrance of our soldiers killed in our Taliban wars, was describing the army as the defender of the country’s ideological and geographical frontiers. For the time being, I think, we should concentrate on ideology and leave geography well alone, the Abbottabad assault having made a mockery of our geographical frontiers.
Every other country in the world is happy if its armed forces can defend geography. We are the only country in the world which waxes lyrical about ideological frontiers. To us alone belongs the distinction of calling ourselves a fortress of Islam.
In the wake of the Raymond Davis affair a certain sternness had crept into our tone with the Americans, as we told them that they would have to curtail their footprint in Pakistan. I wonder what we tell them now. It is not difficult to imagine the smile on American lips when we now speak of the absolute necessity of minimising CIA activities.
With whom the gods would jest, they first make ridiculous. The hardest thing to bear in this saga is not wounded pride or breached sovereignty but our exposure to ridicule. Osama made us suffer in life and has made us look ridiculous after his death. Around the tallest mountains there is the echo of too much laughter at our expense.
Consider also the Foreign Office statement of May 3, “As far as the target compound is concerned, ISI had been sharing information with CIA...since 2009....It is important to highlight that taking advantage of much superior technological assets, CIA exploited intelligence leads given by us to identify and reach Osama bin Laden.” This is hilarious. If we were aware of the compound and had suspicions about its occupants what ‘superior technological assets’ were required to go in and find out?
But what takes the cake is the stern warning attached: “This event of unauthorised unilateral action cannot be taken as a rule. The government of Pakistan further affirms that such an event shall not serve as a future precedent for any state, including the US.” We can imagine the CIA trembling in its shoes. My son burst out laughing when he read this. If the Americans get a clue to the whereabouts of Ayman al-Zawahiri or Mullah Omar will they ask our permission before sending their SEAL teams in?
The CIA chief, Leon Panetta, has rubbed the point in: “It was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardise the mission. They might alert the targets.” That’s about the level of trust we seem to inspire.
Anyway, trust Prime Minister Gilani to put it best, that the failure to find Osama for so long was not just Pakistan’s failure but that of intelligence agencies around the world. This is really cool, absolving ourselves of all responsibility even when Osama is discovered within walking distance of PMA Kakul.
We have some funny notions of sovereignty and national honour. The CIA spreading itself wide in Pakistan is a breach of national sovereignty, and rightly so. And American boots on the ground, as in Abbottabad, are totally unacceptable. But when it comes to Al Qaeda using Pakistan as a base, Sirajuddin Haqqani and the rest of the Taliban holed up in North Waziristan and Taliban elements in Quetta, we somehow can’t work up the same outrage.
We already had a tough job on our hands convincing the world of our bona fides. After the Osama operation it gets that much tougher.
In an ideal world this should be a wakeup call for Pakistan, an opportunity for some honest introspection and a hard look at some of the bizarre notions underpinning our theories of national security. Must we spend so much on defence? Is the world engaged in a conspiracy to undermine our foundations? Aren’t our nuclear weapons enough to give us a sense of security? Hasn’t the time come to curb some of our zest for nurturing and sustaining jihadi militias? And isn’t it time we stopped fretting so much about Afghanistan and made internal order and prosperity the principal focus of our endeavours?
But we do not live in an ideal world and our capacity for self-deception should not be under-estimated. Shaken as we may be by the Osama operation, we can safely assume that we won’t take this as a wakeup call. As the Foreign Office statement vividly shows, we’ll hunt for lame excuses and hide behind false explanations, convinced of our ability to fool the world when the only thing fooled will be ourselves.
So we will keep talking about strategic assets and good and bad Taliban, and about protecting our interests in Afghanistan, and we’ll keep subscribing to theories of Indian hostility and encirclement, because these are the foundations on which stands the peculiar national security state we have constructed, forever threatened and insecure.
If the separation of East Pakistan was not a wakeup call, if Musharraf’s adventure in Kargil wasn’t that either, it is too much to expect that Pakistan’s comprehensive exposure in this saga, the Islamic Republic without its clothes, will lead to any radical departures in national outlook.
Our ruling establishment is too set in its ways and, sadly, the roots of national stupidity run too deep.
And perish the thought of anyone taking responsibility and throwing in his papers. That’s just not the Pakistani way.
But there should be no escaping the fact that from now on we will have to be more careful. All the signs suggest that this may prove to be a milestone of sorts, a dangerous turning point, in that our friends, let alone our enemies, become more sceptical of our pronouncements and increasingly less willing to put up with our hidden and double games.
We will be asked some tough questions and the time for bluster or a show of righteous indignation may have passed."
Something has changed (in Dawn newspaper)
While international journalists and US lawmakers continue to ask these questions, Pakistan observers are at pains to point out that the answers matter little given that nothing has changed — the status quo has been maintained.
Their cynical stance alludes to the civil-military power dynamic in Pakistan; the oscillating nature of the US-Pakistan relationship; military strategy in Afghanistan; and the overall shape of global terrorism. On this point, however, the observers are wrong. Something has changed. Thanks to the unilateral raid of Osama bin Laden’s house, Pakistanis have glimpsed a potential future when the world’s policies towards their country shift from engagement to containment. Not surprisingly, they do not like what they see.
Recently, a prominent local talk show host caused an international stir by pointing out the historic, gargantuan flaws in Pakistan’s national security strategy and demanding change. His harangue did not reverberate in isolation. Across the country, the slow grumble of accountability is finding voice. Pakistanis want to know exactly what is going on, why their country is the biggest haven for terrorists, and how it’s going to work out in the end.
Bin Laden’s killing is not in itself a game-changer. But the circumstances of his death crystallise the challenges Pakistan will face when it finally reckons with military thinking that sees militant groups as ‘strategic assets’ that can be deployed as proxies against enemies. If one considers how Pakistan might begin to evolve beyond this strategic posture, it quickly becomes apparent that there are no good options.
Let’s start with the no-change-in-strategy option. In the short-term, particularly as the US plans a valid endgame in Afghanistan, international patience with militant safe havens will wane. Under increasing domestic pressure to reduce defence expenditure and facilitate troop withdrawal, it is possible that the US government may opt to take military action against Pakistan-based militant groups.
Such interventions would no doubt cause a breakdown in the bilateral relationship, and spell equal trouble for both parties.
The US would certainly find its task in Afghanistan more challenging. But the consequences for Pakistan would be far more devastating, as cessation of foreign assistance could precipitate an economic collapse.
In a more dramatic scenario, a terrorist attack against foreign targets, perhaps in the US or India, might be traced back to Pakistan. Depending on the nature and scale of the attack, the affected country would be compelled to take retaliatory military action. Even if the reaction were restrained, it would necessitate a belligerent Pakistani response and thus spur Islamabad’s diplomatic isolation. More troublingly, in the event of a more severe or widespread response, Pakistan could
find itself embroiled in a contained conflict, or, in a worst-case scenario, war.
Taking a longer view, if Pakistan allows militant groups to proliferate and seek sanctuary within its borders, it will lose whatever credibility it has left and find itself banished to the margins where rogue states languish. Trade treaties and diplomatic relations will be less forthcoming, as nations will hesitate to establish ties with a state that is seen to sponsor terrorism. Unilateral strikes against militant havens would also probably become more frequent.
In all these eventualities, Pakistan would find its sovereignty violated, its armed forces cornered or compromised, and its diplomatic relations degraded from engagement to containment, causing this already fragile state to edge ever closer to failure. On the other hand, the Pakistan Army cannot neatly solve the ‘strategic asset’ dilemma by reversing its decades-old policies and taking military action against formerly state-supported militant groups. Action against militant leadership would no doubt result in a severe backlash leading to devastating civilian casualties. Attacks such as the horrifying suicide bombing at a paramilitary training centre in Charsadda on Friday would become commonplace. (Granted, that attack was probably not a direct retaliation to the killing of Bin Laden, but the fact that the Pakistani Taliban has claimed it as such indicates what direction the group’s future activities will take).
The fact that Pakistanis die and Pakistan suffers no matter what course of action our establishment adopts with regard to homegrown militant groups is sobering.
It also explains why the leadership’s responses to the Abbottabad fiasco have involved so much navel-gazing. Army chief Gen Kayani has been visiting garrisons, hell-bent on asserting his authority; the PPP-led coalition government has been issuing pro-US and pro-army statements by turns in an effort to ensure its longevity; and the PML-N has taken this opportunity to curry further favour with the judiciary, while hitting out against the government. This petty politicking hardly counts as crisis management, but it begins to make sense once one realises that a more profound discussion only brings bad news for Pakistan.
In this context, parliament’s decision on Friday to revisit national security strategies is disappointing because of its focus on foreign relations (particularly the bilateral relationship with the US). What will it take for Pakistan to contend with the reality that its greatest threats are internal rather than external?
The time has never been riper for a parliamentary review of security policies to tackle head on the challenges outlined above. But it seems unlikely that the establishment will be forthright about where the trouble really lies. Pakistanis can therefore anticipate more unanswered questions and nothing but bad choices.
The writer is the Pakistan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington.
huma.yusuf@gmail.com
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