“Will Pakistan Break Up?”

Will Pakistan Break Up?
By Selig S. Harrison, Director of the Asia Program, Center for International Policy
Reviewed by David T. Jones, co-author of Uneasy Neighbo(u)rs
Text: http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/0609_Remarks_Harrison.pdf
Video: http://www.carnegieendowment.org/events/ ?fa=eventDetail&id=1358&prog=zgp&proj=znpp (Click on “Event Video”)

On June 9, Selig Harrison addressed the Carnegie Endowment on the topic of “Will Pakistan Break Up?” Harrison’s speech was built around his April special report for the Center for International Policy, Pakistan: The State of the Union. Harrison examined the region and finds Pakistani and U.S. action unmitigatedly misguided.

He usefully begins with a primer on the origins of Pakistan and its ethnic tensions for readers unfamiliar with South Asian studies. He detailed the issues between the principal minorities (Baluch, Pashtuns, and Sindhis) who claim rights/authority over 70 percent of the country and the dominant Punjabis – who are two-thirds of the population. Harrison argued that there is serious potential not just for continued unrest/armed resistance, but for Indian sponsorship of separatist movements – particularly if the Pakistan government continues to fail to take strong action against the terrorist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, that perpetrated the Mumbai attack. To avoid a secession crisis, Harrison argued, the current government must honor the regional autonomy provisions in the 1973 Pakistan Constitution – an unlikely approach as it would weaken central government authority and military control.

Harrison also downplayed the wisdom and effectiveness of U.S. drone attacks on Taliban targets, arguing that while they have had “some success,” when combined with central government Punjabi soldiers attacking Pashtun territory, they drive the Pashtuns into the arms of Taliban/al-Qaeda. Instead, the United States should “focus on creating a favorable political environment for low-profile covert operations designed to separate the Taliban factions from Al Qaeda” – an objective easier proposed than performed. At the same time, we should encourage compromise with the Taliban – Harrison finds more virtue in the failed Swat Valley agreement than most observers – as these local Taliban, in his judgment, do not threaten the United States.

Harrison urged that the United States be sympathetic toward the “political aspirations” of the Pashtun minority and encouraged the creation of a Pashtun province – a development that would “completely alter the psychological climate [of] the campaign against Al Qaeda.” And if an independent Pashtunistan were to eventuate, Harrison is sanguine that it would not threaten U.S. interests, assuming it remained under secular leadership.

At the core of the problem, however, lies the United States. In Harrison’s view, we have created a “Frankenstein” with 50 years of support for the “bloated” Pakistan military, which dominates the civilian government/leadership. Consequently, we should “…cut back very substantially on military aid, including…cash subsidies… and push civilian control of ISI.”

Harrison is a contrarian, but with a better track record than most and thereby worthy of attention, if not agreement.

Remarks by Selig S. Harrison, Director, Asia Program, Center for International
Policy
“Will Pakistan Break Up?”
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
June 09, 2009.

I’m going to start with a citation from the Scripture. Scripture for me on the subject
of Pakistan is an important book called The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s Partition, by Narendra Singh Sarila, a retired Indian diplomat who was the ADC to
Mountbatten. He got unprecedented access to the British archives. In his book he presents
detailed, definitive evidence showing that as early as March, 1945, Winston Churchill and the
British General Staff decided that Partition was necessary for strategic reasons. They
deliberately set out to create Pakistan because Jinnah had promised to provide military
facilities and Nehru refused to do so.

This is the key to understanding why Pakistan is so dysfunctional. It’s an artificial
political entity. The British put together five ethnic groups that had never before co-existed
in the same body politic historically. The Bengalis were the biggest. They outnumbered all
of the other four combined—the Punjabis, the Pashtuns, the Baluch and the Sindhis. Five
became four of course when Bangladesh seceded.

As it happened I was in Dacca during the Bangladesh crisis of 1971 when the Army
moved in to crush the independence movement. I had a memorable conversation with
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in which he said it would be best if the Bengalis did secede because
Pakistan would be more manageable without them. What he meant was that he would have
a better chance of running Pakistan in cooperation with the Punjabis if he could get rid of
the Bengalis. And that’s what happened except that the Army, as you know, eventually
executed him.

The Army bequeathed by the British to Pakistan was overwhelmingly dominated by
Punjabi officers and soldiers. So with the Bengalis gone the Baluch, Pashtuns and Sindhis
have faced a cruel historical irony. For centuries they had resisted the incursions of the
Moghuls into their territories, but now they find themselves ruled by Punjabis who invoke
the grandeur of the Moghuls to justify their power. Together the three ethnic minorities
constitute only 33 percent of the population, but they consider 72 percent of Pakistan
territory to be their ancestral homelands. That is a prescription for built-in conflict.
Let’s look at the Baluch first because they have an active insurrection going. They
never wanted to be in Pakistan. They had to be forcibly incorporated in 1958 by a Pakistan
occupation Army. The army still has cantonments located all over Baluchistan to cope with
an insurgency that is periodically suppressed and then soon revives. The insurgency is fueled
primarily by Baluch resentment of the Punjabi economic exploitation of Baluchistan,
especially the extraction of most of the natural gas used by the rest of Pakistan on what the
Baluch consider unfair terms. Baluchistan has enormous natural resources including oil that
can’t be developed until the insurgency ends. There are 22 foreign investment projects in
Baluchistan now on hold so this is a big debilitating economic problem for Pakistan in
addition to a political and military problem.

The Army and its intelligence agencies do their best to divide the Baluch by buying
off and assassinating their leaders. They have killed two strong leaders of the Baluch
insurgent forces in recent years, first Akbar Bugti and more recently Balach Marri, making
them martyrs. At the moment the Baluch armed struggle does not have effective united
leadership but the six million Baluch are politically more aroused than ever before. There
are still some moderate Baluch political figures who favor staying in Pakistan if the
minorities get the provincial autonomy envisaged in the 1973 Constitution, but support for
independence is growing. The ISI continues to round up Baluch and Sindhis without giving
them access to lawyers and courts despite the advent of the so-called civilian government in
Islamabad. More than 900 Baluch and Sindhi activists have disappeared without a trace. I
urge you to read the Amnesty International report, Denying the Undeniable: Enforced
Disappearances in Pakistan, which cites chapter and verse on this massive violation of human
rights, more than the much publicized disappearances in Pinochet’s Chile.
By themselves, the Baluch are in a weak position militarily, but they are beginning to
forge alliances with Sindhi factions that could become significant. What the Baluch and
Sindhi leaders are talking about is a sovereign Baluch-Sindhi federation stretching from the
Indian border to Iran. The most obvious impediment to this dream of course is the fact that
Karachi is right in the middle of the area concerned with a multi-ethnic population. But the
Baluch and Sindhis point out that Karachi depends on gas and water pipelines crossing
through areas of the surrounding countryside under their control.

In my report I conclude that the future of Sind and Baluchistan will depend on how
relations between India and Pakistan evolve. Until now there has been a consensus in India
that a stable Pakistan is in the Indian interest. But Pakistan’s failure to act against Lashkar-e-
Taiba since the Mumbai attacks has led to some re-thinking.

As Indian anger grows, so does the view that India should support Baluch and
Sindhi separatism, either as an alternative to full-scale military retaliation against Pakistan or
as a key part of a two-front military strategy. As an alternative, stirring up the Baluch and
Sindhis would avoid the risks of a direct military encounter with Pakistan that could escalate
to the nuclear level and lead to an exodus of foreign investment. As part of a two-front
strategy, Indian support for Baluch and Sindhi insurgents would keep substantial Pakistani
forces tied down on the long Sind frontier while others face Indian forces in Kashmir, or the
Punjab, or both.

For the past five years, Pakistan has accused India of aiding Baluch insurgent groups through
its consulates in Afghanistan but has not provided supporting evidence. These charges have
lacked credibility because the Baluch have fought with ineffectual small arms. The Baluch
say their weaponry has been purchased on the black market, with funding from Baluch
compatriots in Dubai and other Persian Gulf states. Should India in fact decide to give the
Baluch large-scale sophisticated weaponry, logistical help and funds, they could rapidly
expand their present force of 4,500 fighters, drawing on the large numbers of Baluch
unemployed.

At present, the prospects for an independent Baluchistan, or a Baluch-Sind
federation, appear remote. But the game-changer would be a war between India and
Pakistan in which the Indian air force directly supports Baluch insurgent forces. In past
battles with the Baluch the Pakistan air force has bombed Baluch insurgents and civilians
alike ruthlessly and the Baluch would need Indian air cover to take and hold territory.
In addition to their enormous firepower, the Pakistan armed forces control a wideranging
business empire with assets of $38 billion that gives them the economic staying
power needed to sustain a protracted struggle.

Whether or not tensions with India lead to the breakup of Pakistan, Baluch and
Sindhi separatist groups are likely to increase their paramilitary capabilities in the years ahead.
Thus, unless the central government pursues a peaceful accommodation with the minority
provinces, Pakistan’s already-serious economic problems will be intensified by debilitating
ethnic tensions. These tensions will hinder economic development and make the
implementation of foreign investment agreements impossible in large sections of the
country. In my report I discuss in detail what is necessary for a peaceful accommodation,
especially implementation of the 1973 Constitution leading to a meaningful devolution of
power to the provinces.

Now, turning to the Pashtuns, it is necessary to bear in mind that the 41 million
Pashtuns on both sides of the border have a long history of unity.
Prior to the British Raj, the Pashtuns had been politically unified since 1747 under
the banner of an Afghan empire that stretched eastward into the Punjabi heartland up to the
Indus River. It was traumatic for them when the British seized 40,000 square miles of
ancestral Pashtun territory between the Indus and the Khyber Pass, embracing half the
Pashtun population, and then imposed the Durand Line, formalizing their conquest. The
British subsequently handed over this territory to the new government of Pakistan in 1947
after a controversial 1947 referendum in the Northwest Frontier Province. The referendum
was administered under the control of British colonial authorities who openly favored the
accession of the province to Pakistan. Out of 572,799 eligible voters, only 292,118 voted.
This was because the referendum was boycotted by many Pashtuns. The Pashtun parties
that had overwhelmingly won the 1946 provincial elections wanted the referendum to
include the option of an independent “Pashtunistan” in addition to a choice between India
and Pakistan. The leaders of these parties were imprisoned prior to the referendum and
their newspapers banned after their “Bannu Declaration” calling for “Pashtunistan” on June
22, 1947. Out of those Pashtuns who did vote in tribal gatherings convened by the British
authorities, all but 2,894 voted for Pakistan. Thus the issue was decided by 50.5 percent of
the eligible electorate amid charges of blatant rigging that still resonate today.
After the creation of Pakistan, Zahir Shah’s monarchy, Mohammed Daud’s republic
and the short-lived Communist regime in Kabul have all challenged Pakistan’s right to rule
over its Pashtun areas. At times Afghanistan has espoused the goal of an autonomous
Pashtun state to be created within Pakistan, at times an independent “Pashtunistan” to be
carved out of Pakistan and at times a “Greater Afghanistan” that directly annexes the lost
territories.

The resistance movement against the Soviet occupation and the U.S. offensive
against Al Qaeda and the Taliban that began in 2001 have produced deep divisions in
Pashtun society that make the future of the Pashtunistan” movement uncertain. The
traditional supremacy of the malik over the mullah in tribal society was weakened when the
United States, together with Islamist groups in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, channeled
weapons aid and funding for the anti-Soviet struggle to favored Islamist clients in
Afghanistan. This was at the behest of the Pakistan Directorate of Inter-Services
Intelligence. The ISI’s objective was to build up surrogates opposed to the Pashtunistan
concept. When these surrogates proved unable to consolidate their power after Soviet forces
left, the ISI turned to the Taliban, which had a Pashtun base but was dominated by clerical
leaders with a pan-Islamist ideology. Significantly, however, the Taliban government that
ruled from 1996 to 2001 did not accept the Durand Line despite Pakistani pressure to do so.
Notwithstanding the divisions in Pashtun society produced by the convulsions of the
past three decades and the resulting growth in the power of the mullah at the expense of the
malik, the Pashtuns continue to have a powerful sense of collective identity rooted in an
ancient tribal structure that still defines their lives. The preeminent British expert on the
Pashtuns is Richard Tapper, Professor Emeritus at the London School of Oriental and
African Studies. We should bear in mind what Tapper says: “In spite of the endemic
conflict among different Pashtun groups, the notion of the ethnic and cultural unity of all
Pashtuns has long been familiar to them as a symbolic complex of great potential for
political unity.”

Military action in the Pashtun border areas by the Pakistan armed forces, and by U.S.
predator aircraft, has resulted in widespread civilian casualties. That has had a profound
political impact. The newly-politicized and radicalized Pashtuns of the Federally
Administered Tribal Areas, known as FATA, now see themselves as political brethren of the
Pashtuns in the Northwest Frontier Province and the northern corner of Baluchistan. They
want economic development, but development under Pashtun control, not under the control
of the Punjabi-dominated central government. More important, by arousing a Pashtun sense
of victimization at the hands of outside forces, the conduct of the “war on terror” in FATA
has strengthened the very Jihadi forces that the U.S. seeks to defeat. The Taliban has its
leadership base in the Ghilzai Pashtun tribes, so U.S. policy has enabled the Taliban to pose
as the champion of both Islam and of Pashtun nationalism.

In the conventional wisdom, one or the other, either Islamist or Pashtun identity,
will eventually triumph, but there is another equally plausible possibility that the result could
be what Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States, Hussain Haqqani, has called an
“Islamic Pashtunistan,” embracing some or all of the Pashtuns on both sides of the border.
At a Washington seminar on March 1, 2007, at the Pakistan Embassy, Haqqani’s predecessor
as Ambassador, Major General (Ret) Mahmud Ali Durrani, a Pashtun, commented that “I
hope the Taliban and Pashtun nationalism don’t merge. If that happens, we’ve had it, and
we’re on the verge of that.”

What does all of this mean in terms of U.S. interests and policies? The reduction of
ethnic tensions is directly related to how we deal with Al Qaeda and I’ll discuss that first.
Then I’ll consider how a breakup of Pakistan would affect the struggle against jihadi forces
in Pakistan and broader U.S. interests in South Asia.

To destroy the Al Qaeda infrastructure in Waziristan we have to get the cooperation
of the Pashtun tribes and the Pashtun Taliban leaders who are giving Al Qaeda sanctuary.
But in fact what we are now doing reinforces Pashtun support for Al Qaeda. Sending in
Punjabi soldiers and inflicting Pashtun civilian casualties with drone attacks has increasingly
driven the Pashtuns into the arms of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. And as I have said earlier
this has increasingly politicized and radicalized the FATA Pashtuns. Of course the drone
attacks have had some success but as Bruce Riedel has observed, “it’s like going after a
beehive bee by bee.” The benefits in my view are outweighed by the political costs.
My report argues that the United States should stop the drone attacks, stop encouraging
Pakistan to send in Punjabi soldiers to fight Pashtuns and focus on creating a favorable
political environment for low-profile covert operations designed to separate the Taliban
factions from Al Qaeda. Most of the Taliban factions focus operationally on local objectives
in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They do not pose a direct threat to the United States. The
secular Pashtun leaders of the Awami National Party were right in trying to get a peace deal
in Swat and it’s not clear that it was foredoomed to failure. Some of them think that
Islamabad overreached by insisting on appellate jurisdiction and control of judicial
appointments. They think that the deal might not have collapsed if Islamabad had been
more flexible on these issues.

The United States should encourage peace initiatives with Taliban factions in
Pakistan just as we are now planning to do at the local level in Afghanistan. The idea of
peace deals was discredited during the Musharraf period but those deals were negotiated by
the ISI and did not have local standing.

The report also recommends that the United States should demonstrate to the
FATA Pashtuns that it understands their political aspirations. The FATA Pashtuns do not
want to be ruled by the Punjabi-dominated central government as is now being proposed.
What they want is integration into the Pashtun NWFP, as an International Crisis Group
report on March 13 recognized. This would place them under the same legal system and the
same Political Parties Act applicable to other Pakistanis. The United States should
encourage the integration of FATA into the NWFP and encourage the creation of a unified
Pashtun province uniting NWFP, FATA and the Pashtun areas of Baluchistan and the
Punjab in one entity to be called “Pakhtunkhwa.” The Pashtuns want a stronger position in
relation to the Punjabis and U.S. support for that objective would completely alter the
psychological climate in which the campaign against Al Qaeda is operating.
As I have said earlier, the emergence of an independent Pashtunistan would not
necessarily threaten U.S. interests if it is under secular leadership. Similarly, an independent
Baluch-Sindhi Federation would not necessarily conflict with U.S. interests because the
Baluch and Sindhi areas are strongholds of secular values and moderate Islam. Most of the
Sindhis are Sufis and many of the Baluch are Zikris. They reject the Wahabi and Deobandi
brand of Islam pushed by the Sepa-e-Sehaba and other virulently anti-Shia Sunni groups in
the Punjab. The Islamist threat is centered in the Punjab where Lashkar-e-Taiba and other
hard-core jihadi groups are increasingly strong. Nevertheless, my report argues that the
secession of Baluchistan and Sind is not desirable and not likely if the autonomy provisions
of the 1973 Constitution are honored and if tensions between India and Pakistan subside.
I have used the word debilitating several times because it best describes the impact
of ethnic tensions on Pakistan. Ethnic tensions will steadily debilitate Pakistan even if it
hangs precariously together. Reducing ethnic tensions has been made more difficult by the
United States, which has created a Frankenstein by pouring in military aid for the past fifty
years. We now confront bloated armed forces that have become a privileged elite and have a
vested interest in holding onto power. They smother civilian government in Islamabad and
oppose the constitutional reforms necessary to stabilize the Federation. The United States
should do what it can to strengthen the civilian leadership and encourage a devolution of
power but it may be too late. President Zardari does what the Army wants in order to hold
onto his position and Prime Minister Gillani works with the ISI to outflank Zardari. The
result is that the civilian government lets the Army and the ISI do what they want in the
minority provinces and Zardari, despite his promises, is afraid to implement the 1973
Constitution.

The U.S. could help to reduce ethnic tensions by cutting back very substantially on
military aid including the cash subsidies known as Coalition Support Funds and by pushing
civilian control of ISI. There’s an excellent blueprint for U.S. policy in a book just published
by Carnegie, Reforming the Intelligence Agencies in Pakistan’s Transitional Democracy, by Frederic Grare, who was a member of the advisory committee of my study.
In conclusion, the U.S. faces a crisis in its relations with Pakistan and India right now
that bears directly on the issues we have been discussing. The Pakistan government has
taken no significant action against Lashkar-e-Taiba since the Mumbai attacks and has just
released two of its leaders who had been under house arrest. None of its militias have been
disarmed. Despite this, the Administration is asking Congress to approve another $10.5
billion in aid, and Congressional leaders are considering all kinds of conditions except the
most important one—cracking down on Lashkar-e-Taiba. India is increasingly upset about
Pakistan’s lack of action, and there’s a deceptive calm in India-Pakistan relations. Another
Lashkar-e-Taiba attack would undoubtedly lead to Indian retaliation including covert or
overt support for Baluch and Sindhi insurgent forces. So the bottom line is that confronting
the jihadis in the Punjab, keeping Pakistan together and preventing another India-Pakistan
war are inseparable.