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Saying no to the military
The US must realise that as long as Pakistan?s military continues to control State institutions, there will not be any improvement in the security of the region.
A Freedom Foundation-Foreign Policy magazine survey has ranked Pakistan 9th among the top 10 failed States in the world in 2006. To add insult to injury, Afghanistan is listed as a lesser failed State than Pakistan. Interestingly Pakistan’s ranking in the failed States index was better at number 34 last year.
There are obviously many reasons that have adversely affected Pakistan’s performance — continuing concerns over non-proliferation, the explosive situation in Balochistan where a civil war is raging, the presence of the Taliban along the Pakistan border with Afghanistan, its support for militancy in Jammu & Kashmir. The main reason perhaps was the devastating earthquake that hit north-western Pakistan last year.
While the earthquake couldn’t be prevented, Pakistan has proved singularly unable to curtail, even prevent, the Taliban’s presence on its territory or deal with the Baloch issue. President Pervez Musharraf can go on issuing denial after denial till he is blue in the face but it is unlikely that anyone, anywhere in the world, is going to believe him when he says that the Taliban is not operating from bases in Pakistan; that Osama bin Laden does not have a sanctuary there; and that the ISI is innocent of terrorism in India.
Pakistan’s denial on the Taliban front is perhaps the most intriguing of all its actions. Recently Musharraf rubbished Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s detailed dossier of house numbers, village locations and hideouts inside Pakistan from where terrorists were striking Afghanistan. Tasneem Aslam, Pakistan’s Foreign Office spokeswoman, said the allegations against Pakistan were baseless. Later Afghan Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta told a news conference that “the ideological leadership and also the political leadership and military leadership of the Taliban and other international terrorist groups...are living in Pakistan”. Pakistan’s Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao contested the allegation. “We deny Taliban leaders are here,” he said.
Pakistani officials vehemently denied a report from Afghanistan that its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) ordered the killing of an Indian telecom engineer, K. Suryanarayana. A senior Taliban commander from the Zabul province made this revelation in an exclusive interview to a private television channel, Tolo TV. It was in Zabul province that Suryanarayana had been kidnapped three weeks ago and later brutally beheaded.
They stuck to their ‘vehement denial’ strategy when a British military officer, too, pointed to Pakistani complicity in sheltering the Taliban. A senior British officer, Colonel Chris Vernon, Chief of Staff for Southern Afghanistan, recently accused Pakistan of allowing the Taliban to use its territory as ‘headquarters’ for attacks on Western forces in Afghanistan. The Taliban leadership was coordinating its campaign from the Pakistani city of Quetta near the Afghan border. The unusually forthright British criticism drew a furious denial from the Pakistan military.
The problem seems to be that the US-led coalition against terror does not appear ready to give up on General Musharraf. They will turn a blind eye to his shenanigans until and unless public opinion around the world tackles Pakistani complicity in supporting terrorism in blatant opposition to several UN resolutions and mandates.
Earlier a US study, published by the Council on Foreign Relations and prepared by Barnett Rubin, Special Representative with the UN, and Lakhdar Brahimi’s advisor on Afghanistan, asserted that ‘parts of the Pakistani State may not be fully on board’ in the fight against the Taliban. It quoted officials as arguing that, given Pervez Musharraf’s ‘vulnerability’, the US should stick to a policy of ‘public support and private pressure’ so as not to destabilise his regime. The study also advocated that Pakistan must close camps for training Kashmiri and Taliban guerrillas run by its ISI.
According to Rubin, the US government must recognise that security in Afghanistan hinged on democratising Pakistan as well. Military domination of the Pakistani State was the problem, not the solution. US policy till now rests on the belief that stability in Pakistan depends solely on the military, a ‘self-serving view’ sold by the latter to their US counterparts for decades, says Rubin. In his view, elections alone would not democratise Pakistan as long as the military continued to control State institutions.
The US needs to send a strong signal at a high level that it wants to see the withdrawal of military control from Pakistan’s civilian institutions and genuine freedom for political parties. This is approximately what Pakistan’s democratic movement, too, is seeking. The recent Nawaz Sharif-Benazir Bhutto meeting is a signal of how serious they are in challenging Musharraf. The West ought to back their efforts, whatever their faults, between them they represent the mainstream of democratic politics in Pakistan.
