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By Cyril Almeida
Friday, 11 Sep, 2009 | 08:17 AM PST
IF it wasn’t obvious within days of 9/11, then it should be obvious by now, eight years later: things were never going to be the same for Pakistan.
The security state’s security environment had changed irreversibly. The question was, did we have the wherewithal and nous to adjust to a new reality?
Events to date suggest that while for years we did not, the more recent record is a mixed bag of success and failure. We needed to do two things. Recognise that the time of ‘non-state actors’, terrorists, militants, call them what you will, as a policy instrument in pursuing our security agenda had passed. And recognise that the old model of exerting influence in Afghanistan had to be dismantled.
But we came up against a familiar foe: ourselves. Or more precisely, the ability of the security establishment to perhaps correctly identify all the dots but then proceed to connect them wrongly.
Bush’s America made it easy for us; for years the Americans were satisfied if we netted Al Qaeda types for them, leaving them to focus on Iraq and bungle the post-war phase in Afghanistan.
If we did eventually wake up to the dangers posed by militants who mixed and matched groups and networks for tactical purposes while trying to stitch together a common strategic aim, we only did so after they, quite literally, blew up in our face.
For those who have followed the arc of militancy and are not ideologically wedded to a state of denial, it was apparent in the ‘90s that the tail was preparing to wag the dog. Al Qaeda’s ideologues, fervent proponents of a militant transnational Islamic agenda and rabid sectarians to boot, were harnessing those we thought were, if not quite in our harness, unlikely to harm our agenda.
The first savage wake-up call to our somnambulist security policymakers in the army high command came with the attacks on Musharraf in December 2003. The second came with the orgy of violence unleashed since 2007.
Admittedly, we had helped create a mess of such epic proportions that perhaps we could not help but cherry-pick from among the militants. The Laskhar-i-Taiba, for example, has eschewed attacks inside Pakistan and its leadership remains amenable to listening with a sympathetic ear to some of the security establishment’s concerns. Decapitate its leadership, however, and you run the risk of splintering the group and untethering its more rabid elements. Better then to start with the worst offenders – the Al Qaeda types, Baitullahs, Fazlullahs, etc – than to take on everyone at the same time.
But eight years is a long time, and it’s a measure of how poorly we have fared that retaking control of Swat is regarded as a ‘victory’. Victory, properly, morally defined, should be the security of the people of this country, security from the threat of suicide bombings and fidayeen attacks, security from the risk of abductions to finance a war machine in Fata, security from the ravages of all-to-easily available drugs, security from other states needing to pump billions of dollars into the country to fight a war against elements living among us, security from the world regarding us as a danger to ourselves and a menace to everyone else.
That’s not to say we should be all warm and cuddly and just walk away from Afghanistan and ask nothing of India. We have a legitimate interest in ensuring a dispensation in Afghanistan in the long term that is reasonably amicable towards us, and it is a reality that not every combination which could emerge fits that description. And setting aside cockamamie ideas of parity with India here, there are genuine concerns that India is unwilling to conclude a peace that involves meaningful give and take and a live-and-let-each-other-grow outcome.
But there is a nagging sense that we remain hostage to the past, a pre-9/11 framework in which we regard what has become a millstone around our necks as a still-viable bargaining chip in a high-stakes game. Fine, we’ll think about pulling the plug on our policies of old and work harder with you to shut down the militant networks, but can we also talk about what you can offer us in Afghanistan and on India, we seem to be saying to the world.
The problem is, the security establishment seems unaware that it may perhaps have connected the dots wrongly. It is so sure of Pakistan’s centrality, so convinced that the Americans will not be able to engineer the outcome they desire in Afghanistan, so ready to pooh-pooh the idea that we could possibly ever be on a slippery slope towards truly losing our internal sovereignty, so sure it is playing its cards right.
But consider this: what if the Americans do succeed in Afghanistan? Succeed not in the sense of eliminating Al Qaeda or defeating the Taliban with a surge of troops as everyone seems to be debating nowadays, but succeed in a $20bn plan to build Afghanistan’s army into a force of a quarter million troops trained and equipped primarily to fight a counter-insurgency.
What if the Americans do take that plan off the drawing board, implement it and then walk away from Afghanistan with everything else remaining the same i.e. Pakistan still dreaming of its importance, the competing strategic interests of Afghanistan’s neighbouring countries still unresolved and India growing ever more friendly with Afghanistan and leery of engaging Pakistan?
Would that not be the ultimate two-front nightmare come true, the very nightmare that contributed partly to us vying to be the predominant outside influence in Afghanistan? To be sure, the Americans will not create an army that could be a match for our conventional forces, but what’s to stop a future Afghan government from building its army’s conventional strength with help from other eager countries?
Where will that leave us? Checkmated? Perhaps not, but at the very least our security policymakers will be patting themselves on the back less and holding their heads more.
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