Manmohan deserves Nishaan-e-Pakistan

Viewed from the perspective of India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s latest peace overture to a recalcitrant Pakistan seems bewildering and a trifle misplaced. How, it is being legitimately asked, can you repose trust in a Pakistan that is unwilling to own up to its misdemeanours and, indeed, is content with the mollycoddling of extremist and terrorist forces? Just because Atal Bihari Vajpayee too was guilty of a similar misjudgement doesn’t necessarily justify its persistence.

Yet, it is important to realise that India’s desperate desire to give its difficult neighbour the benefit of doubt is not an isolated move prompted by some weakness of the national character. Pakistan, which was worsted after the 9/11 attacks and the Anglo-American ‘war on terror’, is on the verge of recovering lost ground and scoring a major foreign policy triumph. This is not because the Manmohan Singh regime is weak and supine. That is only a small part of the problem. The real advantage for Pakistan lies in the fact that an economically devastated West has lost the political resolve to persist with the war in Afghanistan. It is looking for ways to extricate itself from what is generally being regarded as a no-win situation. What India is doing is creating the conditions for an ignominious Anglo-American retreat from Afghanistan. Being nice to Pakistan is a part of India’s facilitation process.

The extent to which defeatism has overwhelmed the West is most evident in the hysterical British reaction to the death of 22 of its soldiers last month. The July toll may seem small by Indian standards — the Maoists have killed more policemen and para-military forces in Chhattisgarh in the same time frame — but in British eyes this is unacceptable. From the perspective of other European participants in the multi-national force it is even more so. The only German soldier who killed a Taliban insurgent had to be flown back home for trauma therapy and the legendary Luftwaffe has ceased all night operations because it is seen as too risky.

There was a naive belief in some European capitals that involvement in Afghanistan actually meant overseeing good works by social workers in the Provincial Reconstruction Teams. The soldiers, it was assumed, would keep a benign eye on things as earnest young do-gooders helped Afghans rebuild schools, practice gender equality and climb up the Human Development Index. When that romantic dream turned into a nightmare amid the harsh realities of Afghanistan, the inclination of European civil society has been to cut losses and run back home.

The Afghan war is without question an unpopular war. The Americans may want more boots on the ground and a few targeted operations, including the one with the menacing name Operation Panther’s Claw, but this is widely seen as a face-saving precursor to departure. Maybe the bases in Baghran and Kandahar may remain, but for all intents and purposes, the war on terror is drawing to a close without any sign of victory.

For Pakistan, this is fantastic news and it is doing its utmost to hasten the departure of the international forces. Having carefully helped the Taliban regroup after the debacle of 2001 and continue its low-intensity guerrilla war, Pakistan is now intent on projecting itself as the proverbial poacher-turned-gamekeeper. It has implored the West to outsource the pacification of Pushtuns to it. After all, no one is said to know the forbidding terrain around the Durand Line better than Pakistan. In return, Pakistan wants the West to create the conditions for its ‘approved’ intervention in Afghanistan.

Ideally, Pakistan has two demands. First, it wants the West to guarantee that the shift of military might from the eastern front with India to the western front will not involve India taking advantage of the situation. Second, Pakistan wants the West to realise that it would be difficult to manage the internal fallout of training its guns on the Taliban unless there is some ideological compensation, such as some recognition of Pakistan’s role in Kashmir. As of now, the West has merely impressed upon India the need to free Pakistani forces in the east so that it can join the main battle in the west. For India, this has meant lowering the temperature on Pakistan-sponsored terrorism directed against India. As of now, the West hasn’t really arm-twisted India on the Kashmir issue. But that is only a matter of time. New Delhi has already demonstrated its inclination to crawl when asked to bend.

The coming months are going to be crucial for Afghanistan. On the face of it, President Hamid Karzai seems set for a clear victory in next month’s presidential election. However, it is clear that both Pakistan and the so-called civil society groups in the West are betting on his ex-World Bank rival Ashraf Ghani as a wholesome alternative to Karzai. Ghani has the support of the anti-Karzai Pushtuns but lacks the incumbent’s ability to garner the votes of the minority communities linked to the erstwhile Northern Alliance.

The presidential election isn’t likely to be entirely free and fair. Given the troubled state of Afghanistan, it can hardly be so. Moreover, the democratic culture hasn’t really taken roots in Afghanistan. Any result that favours Karzai is likely to be strongly disputed by the Ghani camp and the scepticism is certain to be fuelled by both Pakistan and Western Governments anxious to leave Afghanistan to god and Pakistan. It is a possible man-made crisis over the election results that may well set the stage for Pakistan’s formal re-acquisition of its lost ‘strategic depth’.

By refusing to play hard ball in Egypt last month, Manmohan Singh thought he was trying to help the West get its act together in Pakistan. The consequences of his generosity may well be Pakistan’s victory in Afghanistan. The Indian Prime Minister deserves a Nishaan-e-Pakistan award.

A bogus war on Taliban

Pakistan’s offensive, involving severe fighting and heavy casualties, which has reportedly cleared the Swat Valley, Buner and Lower Dir and other tribal areas of Taliban fighters, has been regarded as an indication of Islamabad’s determination to wipe out fundamentalist Islamist terrorism from its soil. Is that so? What does it mean for India?

The trouble is that the Pakistani Army’s claims of success lack adequate independent corroboration. A report by Dexter Filkin in the New York Times of May 8, stated that there was no way of verifying the claims by the Pakistani military’s chief spokesman, Maj Gen Athar Abbas, as newspersons and most outsiders had been blocked from the areas. It further quoted a woman in a refugee camp in Mardan as stating, “The Army and the Taliban are not killing each other — they are friends. They are only killing civilians. When civilians are killed, the Government claims they have killed a bunch of terrorists.”

A report by Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah, published in the New York Times of May 19, about urban guerrilla warfare confronting Pakistani Army as it closed in on Mingora, quotes a statement by the military as claiming that it had started clearing houses in Kanju, a village in the outskirts of Mingora, and residents who had left Kanju described a mounting civilian death toll. It then added, “The Pakistani Army has closed Swat to outsiders and essentially ordered residents to leave. The authorities have also mostly barred journalists from entering the area, making it difficult to verify what is happening.”

Unverified claims by the military are difficult to accept at face value given the latter’s — and the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate’s — close ties with the Taliban. As it has been known for a long time, and as Pakistan’s President, Mr Asif Ali Zardari admitted recently, the ISI and the CIA jointly created the Taliban in 1994. According to a report by Elisabeth Bumiller in the New York Times of April 1, Ms Michelle A Flournoy, Under Secretary of Defence for Policy, acknowledged before the US Senate Armed Services Committee, the US Administration’s concern about a wing of the ISI, which American intelligence officers said was providing money and military assistance to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Under sharp questioning by Sen John McCain, she said that she thought the ISI or at least parts of the latter — were “certainly a problem to be dealt with”.

One has doubtless seen television news clips of the Pakistani Army directing artillery fire and rockets. But at whom? A report by Carlotta Gall and Elisabeth Bumiller in the New York Times of April 28, stated, “After strong criticism here and abroad over its inaction, the Pakistani military deployed fighter jets and helicopter gunships to flush out hundreds of Taliban militants who overran the strategic district of Buner last week.” The Taliban, however, had started retreating from Buner on April 24 under orders from its leader in Swat, Maulana Fazlullah.

According to television channels, the order followed a meeting between Taliban leaders Qari Muhammad Khan and Muslim Khan and the Commissioner of the Malakand division, Syed Muhammad Javed, in the presence of Maulvi Sufi Mohammad, the founder of Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Sharia-e Mohammadi (Movement for the Establishment of Islamic Law) who acted as an intermediary. Further, television channels showed dozens of militants, masked and heavily-armed, driving away in pick-up trucks and minibuses. Muslim Khan, the Taliban spokesman, said on April 25 that all militants who had come from Swat had withdrawn and that only local Taliban fighters from Buner remained in the area. He, however, did not mention how many had left and how many remained. Yet heavy fighting was reported from Buner district on May 6. Surely, “local Taliban” alone could not have held out for so long!

Clearly, there is more in the whole thing than meets the eye. Pakistani leaders, of course, have been talking stridently. Asked to clarify Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani’s statement that the objective of the north-western operations was “to eliminate the militants and terrorists”, Mr Zardari told a television channel during his state visit to the US in early May, “This means clearing out the area of the miscreants and bringing life to normalcy.” Asked if “eliminate” meant “killing them all”, he replied, “That’s what it means.” But then not all of Mr Zardari’s and Mr Gilani’s statements can be taken at face value. Besides, the Army can overrule both. After the terrorist attack on Mumbai on November 26 last year, they promised to send the ISI’s Director-General, Lt Gen Ahmad Shuja Pasha, to Delhi to help in the investigations. Mr Zardari finally admitted in an interview with NBC news on May 10 what had been known from very beginning — that the Army did not let him send Lt Gen Pasha!

Clearly, it is too early to say how successful the Pakistani Army’s offensive has been and how far the Army will go in dealing with the Taliban and the Al Qaeda. It is one thing to clear Swat, Buner, Lower Dir and Shangli districts of militants, and quite another to wipe out the Taliban headed by Mullah Omar and the Al Qaeda headed by Osama bin Laden. With both untouched, Taliban militants retreating in the face of the Pakistani Army’s offensive will be sheltered in their strongholds in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas just as the Taliban and Al Qaeda elements fleeing from Afghanistan in the face of the US and the Northern Alliance’s offensive in November 2001 had been sheltered by organisations like Lashkar-e-Tayyeba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, courtesy the ISI.

They will return when the going is good again. For it is one thing to drive the Taliban out and another to hold the territory thus cleared. Has Pakistan the political will to do that? Finally, the offensive does not mean that Pakistan would also act against the LeT and the JeM which it has created to stage terrorist strikes against India. Indeed, the release of Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, head of the LeT and mastermind of the attack on Mumbai on the ground of there being “insufficient” evidence against him, clearly indicates that Pakistan’s sptonsorship of cross-border terrorism against this country will continue.

Pakistan must go Sri lankan way

The Greek saying “money is the sinew of war” is proving true in Pakistan as its armed forces have mobilised an all-round assault against the Taliban. However, it appears more to be an eyewash than anything concrete. With the promise of billions of American dollars as civilian and military aid, Pakistan has told the US Administration that it has begun a massive anti-Taliban offensive. Incidentally, it is after two earlier failed attempts that Islamabad had to once again assure US President Barack Obama that its forces are indeed marching forward to dislodge the jihadis from the areas held by them.

According to the Pakistan military sources, the Taliban and its allies had around 5,000 fighters in the Swat Valley. Over the last few years some of the most feared jihadi organisations have opened offices in Swat, a halfway point in a militant transit route running between Indian Kashmir and eastern Afghanistan. How far Pakistan is serious about wiping out the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the region cannot be ascertained as media and international rescue and relief operations are not allowed within the war zone, and one has to depend on the claims made by the Pakistani Army.

Notwithstanding financial assistance, US Central Command Chief General David Patreaus has warned Pakistan that it will be forced to act if the country is not able to take concrete action against the Taliban. On the other hand, the deteriorating situation in the war zone has forced Mr Obama to comment that the civilian Government in Pakistan is fragile and ill-equipped to handle the crisis on the ground.

It is undoubtedly because of the Pakistani Army’s patronage that the Taliban has gained so much in strength. For media consumption the Pakistani Army says that more than 800 Taliban fighters have been killed by its forces. Yet there is no trace of the bodies. This fact has been confirmed by war correspondents representing national and international newspapers.

The Pakistani Government has demonstrated a lack of capacity and will to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Islamabad needs to learn from Sri Lanka, if it is serious at all about exterminating terrorism from its soil. No quarter should be spared in the fight against the jihadis. Only a take-no-prisoners attitude can win this war for Pakistan.