Second Afghan imbroglio

CURRENTLY Pakistan is in the midst of an intense controversy. The government has decided to join hands with the US-led international war effort against terrorism. This carries a potential for conflict between the government and the people, between pro-changers and no-changers in relation to our Afghan policy and between the ideological and pragmatic schools of thought in the context of a likely war between an Islamic and a non-Islamic country.

This is the third time in the short history of Pakistan that the government has taken a policy decision which it needs to sell to the people against considerable odds. During the 1956 Suez crisis, the then government stood by the West while sections of the public took to the streets against the official line. During the 1991 Gulf War, Pakistan again found itself supporting the US-led international coalition which was at war with Iraq. The opposition came from a much wider section of the elite and masses than in the case of Suez. However, the government stood its ground firmly.

History is repeating itself in the year 2001. The government has committed itself to support the US-led coalition against the Taliban of Afghanistan. Kabul is much nearer to Pakistan than Suez or Baghdad. There are millions of Pushtu-speaking people on this side of Pak-Afghan border who have a strong ethnic and linguistic affinity with those in Afghanistan, apart from the two million Afghans living in Pakistan. Also, what is involved in the present context is a change in the current policy which has pitted the government against highly motivated individuals and groups, as compared to what it was like on the two previous occasions.

Three major schools of thought are operating in the country. One is of the ‘we-told-you-so’ genre. This school is generally made up of liberal and educated sections of the public, the English press and the relatively cosmopolitan elements within and outside the establishment. They have maintained all along that Pakistan was betting on a losing horse. But weren’t the Taliban winning on the ground? These elements went beyond that and found the government supporting a lost cause. In their view, the Taliban regime in Kabul which had no legitimacy in the world community was all along casting its grim shadows on Pakistan.

The liberal opinion has condemned various policies and preferences of the Taliban. These included: an essentially punitive perspective on crime and punishment; imposition of an extremely harsh and inhuman code of conduct on women; destruction of Buddha statutes in Bamiyan; segregation of religious minorities; arresting and trying foreign aid workers for proselytizing; helping the sectarian terrorists operating in Pakistan; and causing isolation of Pakistan from the world community for reasons of association.

As opposed to the liberal school, the ideological-strategic school of thought was confined mainly if not exclusively to official quarters, especially in the security set-up. They looked at the role of the Taliban in two important ways. First, Afghanistan under the Taliban represented the strategic depth for Pakistan in a perceived military encounter with India. Thus, a pro-Pakistan government in Kabul met a strategic requirement for Pakistan. Islam provided the common bond. Secondly, the Taliban promised political stability which was considered an asset for Pakistan’s ambitions for economic and diplomatic thrust into Central Asia.

This school considered the Taliban’s Islamic policies and postures an internal matter for Afghanistan. It pointed to the need to safeguard Pakistan’s colossal investment in that country during the last two decades in financial, strategic, economic and political terms. It represented a combination of a traditional heart and a modern mind, reflecting concern for Islamic brotherhood and requirements of a modern state. A large number of serving and retired military officers, the rightist element in the body politic, the conservative section of the urban intelligentsia and Urdu press in general supported this viewpoint.

The third school of thought belonged to the proto-Taliban, people directly or indirectly related to Islamic militant activity in and around Pakistan. This million-strong local constituency of the Taliban reflected a variety of support settings. The sectarian setting was represented by the Deobandi groups. The institutional setting was provided by madrassahs across the country. The tribal setting across the Indus as well as a kind of re-tribalized setting in parts of Karachi comprising a large section of migrants from the upcountry was selectively operating for the proto-Taliban. They are ready to agitate in favour of the Taliban regime and commit their vital resources for the latter’s cause.

What will happen if the much-feared US attack does take place? What are the possible forms of reaction to such an attack? One possible source of hostile reaction is the pro-Taliban Afghans on this side of the border. This can lead to bloody skirmishes in the frontier region. It is true that Taliban have a lot of potential to kill in a tribal warfare. However, they pose a limited threat to the modern and relatively sophisticated armed forces of Pakistan. While Afghans are fierce warriors in their own territory, they have not won a war against non-Afghans across the border in recent history. Indeed, they were twice defeated by the British Indian army.

The second source of trouble can be the proto-Taliban of Pakistan. They are expected to launch an agitation against any US action against Afghanistan. They have the potential to create violence and strife in parts of the country and damage both life and property. And yet, the level of public mobilization on this issue is expected to be limited. This is largely due to doctrinal differences between the majority of Pakistanis who are followers of the sufi tradition and the Taliban who are generally steeped in the Deobandi school of Islamic thought.

The centre of gravity for a proto-Taliban movement may lie in the NWFP because of a third and equally significant dimension of the current scenario — that is, Pushtun-Afghan nationalist sentiment. Pushtuns inside Pakistan have always considered Afghanistan as their original homeland from where they had migrated southwards in successive waves through history. Now the US preparations for attack on the Taliban, billed as a war against terrorism, are aimed at targets inside the Afghanistan. The real issue is the potential of Pakistani nationalism to co-opt Pushtun nationalism.

In addition, the pro-Taliban elements within the establishment may act as an in-built pressure group against any official commitment to total support for Washington. It is the restraint lobby within. Therefore, the government would be obliged to keep its own military involvement at a minimal level in the event of a major offensive against Afghanistan.

Of course, the level and scope of a negative reaction to any American military action will depend on its form and substance. A swift operation, with a well focused and targeted approach, will create ripples of protest but no commotion. However, if Pakistan serves as a platform for attack on its northern neighbour and the American ground troops are visible in an operational context, then emotions could boil over and reaction could be sharp and widespread. A large number of civilian casualties can be extremely damaging to the ability of the government to keep the angry crowds off the street. It will also kill the purpose — avoiding civilian casualties which triggered it all in the first place.

On the political front, power vacuum in a post-Taliban scenario is a vital issue at stake. During the 1988 negotiations leading to the Geneva Accord, the issue of filling the post-Soviet vacuum was initially a centre of intense controversy. However, both the US and the USSR were eager to get out as soon as possible and Pakistan needed to cut its losses. Today, the issue of a post-Taliban settlement is a big worry for the anti-terrorism grand coalition.

In this context, the Northern Alliance is a favourite of the constellation of powers in Central Asia gravitating towards Moscow. The US considers the option in a positive light. But Islamabad has serious reservations about the Alliance because of its perceived anti-Pakistan, non-Pushtun and pro-India disposition.

Islamabad realizes that the Taliban have messed up the whole thing with their bigoted and myopic policies and actions. It feels constrained to play according to the new rules of the game which require a broad-based coalition in Kabul. The case for a moderate section of the Taliban being considered as an alternative has already met with a cold response from the West. However, Islamabad is obliged to secure a set-up for Kabul which is as pro-Pakistan as possible. It will also seek to secure a major role for Pushtun representatives in any future coalition.

The Zahir Shah option is controversial in many ways. The ex-monarch will be required to prove himself more than a mere figure head in an interim coalition. At the advanced age of mid-eighties, he can lend an umbrella for uneasy partners but little else. His role will be transitional in nature and symbolic in character. The element of manoeuvrability within a coalition under Zahir Shah can meet Pakistan’s requirements to some extent.

Indeed, it is doubtful if any coalition in Kabul can survive for long without safeguarding the legitimate interests of Pakistan. Among the regional powers, India is geographically and therefore strategically shut off from the scene of conflict in Afghanistan. China has no direct role in that country. Russia is geographically remote. It will no doubt try to influence the course of events in Afghanistan mainly through certain Central Asian Republics (CARs) playing a proxy role on its behalf. However, the CARs are too weak to play a decisive role in the region. Similarly, Afghanistan as a Sunni-majority country will remain wary of Shia Iran. Also, the international community continues to have reservations about that country.

All this testifies to the fact that Pakistan is a preeminent player in the context of Afghanistan. It has the ability to operate regionally and it has the will to do so. However, it will be obliged to keep a balance between continuity and change in its Afghan policy in the coming weeks and months.

To have your cake and eat it too: LETTER FROM NEW DELHI

A US official has said, “You cannot win Afghanistan and lose Pakistan.” Whatever it means, the fight against the Taliban was bound to bring this predicament in public. They are essentially Islamabad’s creation. If you try to save them, you save in the process the fundamentalist tendencies which have been instilled in them.

Perhaps Islamabad did not want the Taliban to have a one-track mind, be hidebound, living in the domain of Islamic clerics and command. Faith tempered with a sense of accommodation gives the believers strength. But fanaticism is such a heady wine that its consumption is seldom in small doses.

Pakistan’s own top military officer, former ISI chief Hamid Gul, was a midwife. He had turned Afghanistan into an extremist Islamic country and would have gone beyond if liberal Benazir Bhutto had not removed him soon after assuming power. But even she did not dismantle the madrassahs, the breeding ground of fundamentalism, or the ISI special cell which has continued to guide the Taliban. She probably felt secure in having a Muslim state covering Pakistan’s northern flank. Little did she imagine that Islamic Kabul would go one day out of her hand.

Making Afghanistan a fundamentalist state was, in fact, the idea of General Zia-ul-Haq, Benazir Bhutto’s predecessor. When he started extending support to the Mujahideen, who were fighting against the Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan, Zia’s aim was to push back the Russian forces, which were coming down south, closer to the Pakistan border.

As the Soviet withdrawal became a real possibility, Zia’s ambitions expanded. He came to believe that he could, for the first time since 1947, have an Afghan regime genuinely friendly to Pakistan. This would, indeed, give Islamabad the “strategic depth” against India, a goal the Pakistani military planners pursued.

Zia also hoped that the new government in Kabul would reflect his Islamic leanings far more than any previous Afghan regime had and far more than he had been able to impose on his own country.

The Pakistan rulers felt happy in having Kabul under Islamabad’s influence. The ISI used the distant Afghanistan, beyond the gaze of the world, as a training ground for terrorists. They became useful in Chechnya to confront Russia and to bleed India in Kashmir. People in Pakistan woke up to the danger when the tide of fundamentalism or what has come to be known as Talibanization, began to flow into their own country, right into the home of even sophisticated families. This worried the middle class and the liberals alike. But they did not challenge the maulvis and the mullahs. They never dared.

General Pervez Musharraf took action against some jihadi organizations only a few months ago. But it was half-hearted and became ineffective whenever the pressure of fundamentalists worked on Musharraf. Many jihadi groups are armed to the teeth. The Pakistan army would have a big job on its hands if it were to disarm them. The campaign to seize illicit weapons was launched but on a selective basis. But he could not figure out how he could stoke the fires of cross-border militancy without conniving at the terrorists’ activity.

The manner in which Musharraf brings up the issue of Kashmir all the time shows that he does not want to put a brake on cross-border militancy. How does he sustain it if he stops the Taliban? He has banned Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, which Washington has banned, but has allowed terrorist organizations like the Jaish Mohammad, whose leader Azhar Masood, was swapped for the passengers hijacked to Kandahar, to function. He is still pursuing two opposite paths at the same time. Musharraf is trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, as the saying goes.

Pakistan Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar has warned, saying that “any decision on the part of any foreign power to give assistance to one side or another is a recipe for great suffering for the Afghan people.” He may be right but the Taliban are the ones who have been getting military, economic and political assistance. Islamabad has helped them, even by fighting their war to establish their hold on Afghanistan. Pakistan’s irregular troops still serve as the sword arm of the Taliban.

If the Taliban side could capture 90 per cent of Afghanistan with Pakistan’s help there is no reason to pull the alarm chain, when the “other side,” the Northern Alliance, is beginning to reoccupy the areas it had lost to the Taliban. By arguing that their “side” should not be pushed aside, Pakistan is unwittingly saying that the presence of the Taliban in Afghanistan is necessary. The fact is that they, as has been seen in the last few years, have become a monster, hijacking planes, bombing markets and defying every norm of the civilized world. Even if Islamabad were to be their guarantor, how would it change the Taliban, who have become a force which cannot fit into a democratic, tolerant way of living?

Surprisingly, Washington has modified its tone after Sattar’s warning. It had been saying all along that the Taliban were the fountainhead of terrorism and the free world must unite to root out the evil. The strategy has now changed. First, Osama bin Laden and then others. What about the Taliban who have imbibed Osama’s philosophy of superiority and supremacy of Islam all over the world? Their leader, Mulla Omar, has already declared jihad against the Americans and the Jews. And to tell the world that the Taliban meant business, they have even set fire to the deserted American embassy in Kabul.

Afghanistan needs to be retrieved. Fanatics of the right and the left have used its gullible people. They have a culture that accommodates the Pashtoons, the Tajiks, Uzbeks and dozens of other smaller tribes in the Afghan ethos of sturdy independence. But there is no place for the Taliban.

Perhaps the solution lies in having a composite government at Kabul. Leading tribes need to participate in the government. Islamabad is not averse to it but it would have to jettison the Taliban, however useful they are in Islamabad’s scheme of things. King Zahir Shah, ousted from Afghanistan some 30 years ago, has already given a call for peace and unity. He can be the head of a loosely knit Afghanistan. Northern Alliance leader Rabbani has also come round to accepting him.

The real impediment will, however, be imposing discipline on a country that has known none, and removing fundamentalism, which has been imposed on the Afghans. Sattar should not be pleading the case of the Taliban because they will destroy what does not conform to their fanatic outlook. It would be better to tackle the tribal leaders directly because they are more tribal than Islamic.

Sometimes it looks as if history may repeat itself. The Soviet Union was not ready to intervene in Afghanistan in December 1979. The state communist party, Parcham, headed by local leftist leader Babrak Karmal, forced it to do so because the party presented Moscow with a fait accompli. Parcham had already revolted against the then Afghanistan President Hafizullah Amin and had poisoned him. America too has been compelled to come in now because it was left with no choice after Osama’s men struck at the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. One only hopes that the US will not get stuck as the Soviet Union did. If it does the world is in for a lot of trouble. As regards terrorism, every country will have to look within. None has a clean slate. All nations must clamp down on their own extremists. It is a war of values, institutions and human behaviour and not against territory.

Attending to the economy

THE basic quandary of US economic policy has by no means gone away. It has simply become more fraught.

And if US leaders ignore that quandary — or worse yet, if they seem in retrospect to have taken political advantage of the national trauma — Americans will pay a large price, not only economically but in terms of national unity.

The terrorist attack has temporarily suspended the budget debate that dominated politics only 10 days ago. Nobody now thinks that Americans should worry about balancing the non-Social Security budget this year or next.

But the real concern in the days before the attack wasn’t this year’s or next year’s budget. It was the truth — which had finally become almost impossible to deny, though some tried — that the tax cut had wreaked havoc with long-run US fiscal prospects.

And the attack has not changed that truth. Indeed, the long-run fiscal prospect now looks far worse than before — a point not missed by bond markets.

So what should we do — especially given the pressure to do something right now to prop up the economy?

First, we should do no harm. It was irresponsible to propose further long-run tax cuts before the current crisis and it is all the more irresponsible to do so now. —Paul Krugman, in The New York Times

Why practise double standards?: Genesis of international terrorism-11

OF the five types of terror, the focus is on only one, the least important in terms of cost to human lives and human property — the Political Terror of those who want to be heard. The highest cost is state terror. The second highest cost is religious terror, although in the twentieth century religious terror has, relatively speaking, declined.

The Palestinians, the superterrorists of our time, were dispossessed in 1948. From 1948 to 1968 they went to every court in the world. They knocked at every door in the world. They were told that they became dispossessed because some radio told them to go away — an Arab radio, which was a lie. Nobody was listening to the truth. Finally, they invented a new form of terror, literally their invention: the aeroplane hijacking.

Between 1968 and 1975 they pulled the world up by its ears. They dragged us out and said, Listen, Listen. We listened. We still haven’t done them justice, but at least we all know. Even the Israelis acknowledge. Remember Golda Meir, prime minister of Israel, saying in 1970, “There are no Palestinians.” They do not exist. They damn well exist now. We are cheating them at Oslo. At least there are some people to cheat now. We can’t just push them out. The need to be heard is essential. One motivation there.

Most studies show that the majority of members of the worst terrorist groups in Israel or in Palestine, the Stern and the Irgun gangs, were people who were immigrants from the most anti-Semitic countries of Eastern Europe and Germany. Similarly, the young Shiites of Lebanon or the Palestinians from the refugee camps are battered people. They become very violent. The ghettos are violent internally. They become violent externally when there is a clear, identifiable external target, an enemy where you can say, “Yes, this one did it to me”. Then they can strike back.

Example is a bad thing. Example spreads. There was a highly publicized Beirut hijacking of the TWA plane. After that hijacking, there were hijacking attempts at nine different American airports. Pathological groups or individuals modelling on the others. Even more serious are examples set by governments. When governments engage in terror, they set very large examples. When they engage in supporting terror, they engage in other sets of examples.

Absence of revolutionary ideology is central to victim terrorism. Revolutionaries do not commit unthinking terror. The Marxists have always argued that revolutionary terror, if ever engaged in, must be sociologically and psychologically selective. Don’t hijack a plane. Don’t hold hostages. Don’t kill children, for God’s sake. Have you recalled also that the great revolutions, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Algerian, the Cuban, never engaged in hijacking type of terrorism? They did engage in terrorism, but it was highly selective.

My final question is that these conditions have existed for a long time, why then this flurry of private political terrorism? Why now so much of it and so visible? The answer is modern technology. You have a cause. You can communicate it through radio and television. They will all come swarming if you have taken an aircraft and are holding 150 Americans hostage. They will all hear your cause. You have a modern weapon through which you can shoot a mile away. They can’t reach you. And you have the modern means of communicating. When you put together the cause, the instrument of coercion and the instrument of communication, politics is made. A new kind of politics becomes possible.

To this challenge rulers from one country after another have been responding with traditional methods. The traditional method of shooting it out, whether it’s missiles or some other means. Frankly, it won’t work. A central problem of our time, political minds, rooted in the past, and modern times, producing new realities. Therefore in conclusion, what is my recommendation to America?

Quickly. First, avoid extremes of double standards. If you’re going to practise double standards, you will be paid with double standards. Don’t use it. Don’t condone Israeli terror, Pakistani terror, Nicaraguan terror, El Salvadoran terror, on the one hand, and then complain about Afghan terror or Palestinian terror. It doesn’t work. Try to be even-handed. A superpower cannot promote terror in one place and reasonably expect to discourage terrorism in another place. It won’t work in this shrunken world.

Do not condone the terror of your allies. Condemn them. Fight them. Punish them. Please eschew, avoid covert operations and low-intensity warfare. These are breeding grounds of terror and drugs. Violence and drugs are bred there. Wherever covert operations have been, there has been the central drug problem. That has been also the centre of the drug trade. Because the structure of covert operations, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Central America, is very hospitable to drug trade.

Take the example of the last attack on bin Laden. You don’t know what you’re attacking. They say they know, but they don’t know. They were trying to kill Qaddafi. They killed his four-year-old daughter. The poor baby hadn’t done anything. Qaddafi is still alive. They tried to kill Saddam Hussein. They killed Laila bin Attar, a prominent artist, an innocent woman.

They tried to kill bin Laden and his men. Not one but twenty-five other people died. They tried to destroy a chemical factory in Sudan. Now they are admitting that they destroyed an innocent factory, one-half of the production of medicine in Sudan has been destroyed, not a chemical factory. You don’t know. You think you know.

Please help reinforce, strengthen the framework of international law. There was a criminal court in Rome. Why didn’t they go to it first to get their warrant against bin Laden, if they have some evidence? Get a warrant, and then go after him. Internationally, this unilateralism makes us look very stupid and them relatively smaller.

The point about bin Laden would be roughly the same as the point about Sheikh Abdul Rahman, who was accused and convicted of encouraging the blowing up of the World Trade Center in New York City. The New Yorker did a long story on him. It’s the same as that of Aimal Kansi, the Pakistani Baloch who was also convicted of the murder of two CIA agents. Jihad, which has been translated a thousand times as “holy war,” is not quite just that.

Jihad is an Arabic word that means, “to struggle.” It could be struggle by violence or struggle by non-violent means. There are two forms, the small jihad and the big jihad. The small jihad involves violence. The big jihad involves the struggles with self. Those are the concepts. The reason I mention it is that in Islamic history, jihad as an international violent phenomenon had disappeared in the last four hundred years, for all practical purposes.

It was revived suddenly with American help in the 1980s. When the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan, Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator of Pakistan, which borders on Afghanistan, saw an opportunity and launched a jihad there against godless communism. The US saw a God-send opportunity to mobilize one billion Muslims against what Reagan called the Evil Empire. Money started pouring in.

CIA agents starting going all over the Muslim world recruiting people to fight in the great jihad. Bin Laden was one of the early prize recruits. He was not only an Arab. He was also a Saudi. He was not only a Saudi. He was also a multimillionaire, willing to put his own money into the matter. Bin Laden went around recruiting people for the jihad against communism. I first met him in 1986. There he was, rich, bringing in recruits from Algeria, from Sudan, from Egypt, just like Sheikh Abdul Rahman. This fellow was an ally. He remained an ally. He turns at a particular moment.

In 1990 the US goes into Saudi Arabia with forces. Saudi Arabia is the holy place of Muslims, Makkah and Madinah. There had never been foreign troops there. In 1990, during the Gulf War, they went in, in the name of helping Saudi Arabia defeat Saddam Hussein. Osama bin Laden remained quiet. Saddam was defeated, but the American troops stayed on in the land of the Kaaba. Foreign troops.

He wrote letter after letter saying, Why are you here? Get out! You came to help but you have stayed on. Finally he started a jihad against the other occupiers. His mission is to get American troops out of Saudi Arabia. His earlier mission was to get Russian troops out of Afghanistan. See what I was saying earlier about covert operations?

A second point to be made about him is these are tribal people, people who are really tribal. Being a millionaire doesn’t matter. Their code of ethics is tribal. The tribal code of ethics consists of two words: loyalty and revenge. You are my friend. You keep your word. I am loyal to you. You break your word; I go on my path of revenge. For him, America has broken its word. The loyal friend has betrayed. The one to whom you swore blood loyalty has betrayed you. They’re going to go for you. They’re going to do a lot more.

These are the chickens of the Afghanistan war coming home to roost. This is why I said to stop covert operations. There is a price attached to those that the American people cannot calculate and Kissinger type of people do not know, don’t have the history to know.