March 28, 2004

What does it mean for Pakistan to be America’s Major Non-Nato Ally? Hardly anything. At least nothing for the time being. The country remains on the US watch-list. No F-16s in a hurry. Perhaps, never

FROM being one of the most sanctioned countries in the world at the turn of the century, Pakistan has, in the four years since, emerged as a ‘Major Non-Nato Ally’ (MNNA) of the sole superpower of the world. But the road to this point has not been an easy one. And in fact we took a very serious tumble as we entered the penultimate lap. The nuclear proliferation scandal, when it broke out in October 2003, had made it look as if things were going to go terribly wrong for Pakistan.

Even before that we were being reprimanded on almost a daily basis by the international community for not doing enough to control the jihadis from crossing over from Pakistan to Afghanistan and the Indian-held Kashmir (IHK). And all through these four years we had continued to suffer from an image of being an unstable, violent country where Islamic extremism ruled the roost.

And, following the 9/11 incident, travel advisories were slapped on us by the developed world with the same frequency as the high profile dignitaries from these countries visited Islamabad one after the other under the tightest security. It was certainly not a cake-walk to MNNA.

But will the new status accorded to Pakistan by the US change anything? Hardly. At least not for the time being. We still seem to be on the watch-list. No F-16s, in a hurry. Perhaps, not ever. And if ever, then not until, of course, we prove beyond even an iota of doubt that we mean what we are saying about eradicating the jihadi culture from our midst. And that is going to take some doing. You cannot change the mindset of a nation overnight.

And as long as that does not happen, we will continue to be on a leash controlled by the US Centcom chief from Doha, Qatar. The US is not going to take any chances with Pakistan any more like it did in the 1960s and 1980s by giving it lots of arms and funds, and then leaving it to its own devices.

The job of reinventing the Afghan nation which Washington has taken upon itself is going to keep it in Afghanistan for a long, long time. And during this period it would certainly not like to see Pakistan going on some adventure of its own as it did in 1965 by waging a war against India with US weapons provided to it to help contain communism in the region under the Mutual Defence Agreement (MDA) and through Seato and Cento pacts. Washington would not be happy now if Islamabad used the new relationship with the US to indulge in the export of jihad which it did it so overtly throughout the 1990s, mainly to Afghanistan and the IHK.

The US secretary of state has said that MNNA would be a military-to-military arrangement, but it is hardly possible in view of the past experience of the US with Pakistan that Islamabad would be allowed to buy any sophisticated offensive weapons under this arrangement. Instead, US troops in Afghanistan would, under what seems to be an unwritten understanding to be provided through the MNNA, guarantee the defence of Pakistan against any external aggression.

And this arrangement would perhaps also be used to provide legitimate and overt logistic support to the US troops in Afghanistan from Pakistani soil (already the practice since November 2001 and for which we get paid on a regular basis) and maybe also to send Pakistani troops to assist US forces fighting terrorism elsewhere in the world, even perhaps to Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps MNNA status would also oblige Islamabad to allow the US army to join Pakistan troops in the search for terrorists on Pakistani territory. Already the US is providing all kinds of highly sophisticated technical intelligence to our own troops fighting terrorists inside Pakistan.

Also, with peace breaking out in South Asia under the careful nudging of the self-proclaimed facilitator, you can hardly expect Washington to spark an arms race between India and Pakistan by providing sophisticated weapon systems to the latter and destroy the prospects of diffusing an imminent nuclear flashpoint.

Sceptics who believe that the US would abandon Pakistan once again after defeating what is known as international terrorism, base their belief on the three ‘heartbreaks’ that this country was seen to have suffered at the hands of its most allied ally in the past — once in 1965 when the US stopped all military and economic aid to Pakistan after it had gone to war against India, next when it did not come to Pakistan’s rescue when India was dismembering Pakistan in 1971, and then in the late 1980s when it walked away from the region after the collapse of the Soviet Union, abandoning Pakistan to the post-Afghan war vagaries like jihad and the culture of guns and drugs, and finally stopping all economic and military aid to Pakistan once again in 1990 by invoking the Pressler amendment.

But some of this was mythical and spread by the Pakistani establishment. The truth is that Pakistan had joined the US war against communism very early in the day — in 1954 to be precise — without taking the nation into confidence. Another truth is that nowhere in the MDA or Seato or Cento pacts was it mentioned that the US would come to Pakistan’s help if it was attacked by a non-communist country or if it went to war against such a country. And, finally, Pakistan knew when it crossed the nuclear red-line in 1989 that it had violated a US law and was taking the risk of being punished.

The fact of the matter is that all these pacts were meant only for promoting the global interests of the US against communism and not the perceived combined national interests of the Pakistani establishment, its armed forces and its feudal political elite. In the late 1980s, the US walked away from Pakistan because Islamabad’s notion of strategic depth had made it impossible for Washington to inject any sense in the chaos that was being deliberately created by Pakistan for a purpose in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It is, therefore, not totally correct to say that the US abandoned Pakistan in its hour of need in the past. We were only indulging in self-deception on the part of Pakistan.

Now let us turn to the present-day scenario. There is, indeed, a qualitative difference between the circumstances under which, and the reasons for which the US has come back to Pakistan for the third time, and the circumstances that had brought the two together twice during the Cold War.

In the 1950s the armies of the two countries had got together to combat an ideology which the US persuaded a willing Pakistan Army and many others to view as totally alien to this country’s Islamic character. And in those days, the US Information service in Pakistan was known to be a major buyer of the Islamic literature of the Jamaat-i-Islami. The purpose of Washington in helping fund the Jamaat in those days was to enable it to become an effective political arm of the Pakistan Army in order to help it counter the perceived socialist ardour of the poverty-stricken masses of the country. This was part of the overall American strategy of helping and encouraging right-wing religious groupings all over Asia and Africa.

The Pakistan Army accepted this in order to meet its security concerns with regard to India, and keep New Delhi from achieving its perceived hegemonic ambitions.

Next, in the 1980s, the Pakistan Army joined the US to fight its war for the so-called free world against the Soviet Union in the company of the country’s religio-political elements which over the years had been nurtured with political, material and financial help from the establishment to become politically more powerful than their popularity level among the masses merited.

Pakistan used the second coming-together with the US to accumulate defence hardware siphoned off from the US conduit to Afghanistan and used the cover of the thick dust kicked up by the war to pursue its nuclear programme.

But today it is Pakistan itself which seems to be the focus of the US, not an ideology or a third country. It was Pakistan which went up on the US radar immediately following the 9/11 incident as Islamabad was known to be aiding the Taliban and some intelligence elements were known to be providing logistical support (specially oil and wheat) to the Al Qaeda holed up in Afghanistan and who were named by the US as having master-minded 9/11. What followed next is now history. The war which was mounted against Afghanistan by the international community was actually a war against terrorism which had its roots in Pakistan as well. These roots had sprouted out of the senseless notion of strategic depth which the establishment thought ensured its security against a self-perceived expansionist India.

During the Afghan war the CIA had recruited thousands of Muslim youth from all over the world by luring them with the misleading concept of jihad. This allowed the US to fight its war against the Soviet Union without actually pressing its own troops in the battlefield.

And the Pakistan Army after having gained ‘strategic depth’ in the shape of the Taliban government in Kabul used the same trick to achieve its own objectives in the region. It gave a jihadi twist to its agenda viz-a-viz Kashmir and launched what turned out to a low-intensity war in the IHK.

Pakistan did not have to recruit the jihadis afresh. They were already there in the field fighting the civil war in Afghanistan after the Soviets and the US had left the hapless country. So, as the Taliban emerged in due course of time, a final jihad ensued between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance which was being provided assistance by Iran, Central Asian countries, Russia, India, Europe and even perhaps the US. The mujahids recruited from Pakistan joined this jihad in good numbers. And these battle-hardened jihadis were then sent into the IHK.

Besides the IHK, these well-trained jihadis also went to wherever they would see a cause, be it Chechenya, Egypt, Bosnia, the Philippines, Central Asia or China. And perhaps even to the US. We had acquired the reputation of being the hub of jihadi culture and we had also acquired weapons of mass destruction.

In fact, these Jihadis had brought so much notoriety to Pakistan that in 1993 we were almost on the verge of being declared a terrorist state. It is even said that the outgoing US president had left a notification to this effect to the incoming president to sign and issue which, luckily for Pakistan, President Clinton did not, as by that time the Pakistani establishment had gotten rid of the first Nawaz Sharif government, putting the entire blame on it.

It is in this context that we should view the never ending accusations being levelled against us by the US that we are still sponsoring terrorism in Afghanistan and the IHK, indulging in nuclear proliferation and promoting Islamic extremism.

The US could be engaging the Pakistan Army, and drawing it into a long-lasting strategic partnership so as to render it impossible for us to go off on our own any more on home-grown adventures.

US troops are now closely watching over Islamabad while the Pakistan Army is seen to be destroying one by one the jihadi infrastructure so painstakingly built up over the last 20 years, and eliminating the jihadi culture entrenched in the country.

And with the offer of MNNA, the US is seemingly ensuring that Pakistan’s reason for acquiring and keeping nuclear weapons would disappear in due course of time. And to make it doubly sure that Pakistan would have no use of such weapons any more the US is helping Islamabad and New Delhi to resolve their long-standing disputes, including the one over Kashmir.

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