October 24, 2004

‘The crux of Pakistan’s foreign policy problems is the military’s domination over civil society. The troubled civil-military relationship has resulted in a fragile economy and an unhappy federation,’ says Sardar Assef Ahmed Ali

PAKISTAN has been a prisoner of military elite’s bonapartist ambitions, says Sardar Assef Ahmed Ali, a former foreign minister of Pakistan (1993-96) in Benazir Bhutto’s second tenure as the prime minister. They have made Pakistan available for periodic tactical gains by the US, rather than building a long-term relationship with the West, he adds.

In an exclusive interview with Dawn Magazine, Sardar Assef Ahmed Ali discussed the various phases of foreign policy that different Pakistani leaders adopted over the period of half a century. The following are the excerpts:

Q. How do you see the foreign policy pursued by Pakistan in the last five decades? What major mistakes were committed by those in power in various periods?

A. I shall briefly try to answer it. The core issue of the country’s foreign policy rests on two factors: the Indo-Pak relations, particularly with regard to the Kashmir dispute; and the civil-military relationship within Pakistan.

The dispute with India forced Pakistan to look towards the West for support and for its national security. At a very early point after the death of the Quaid-i-Azam, Pakistan took a strategic decision to seek an alliance with the West. This relationship was a reactive one because of Indian proximity to the Soviet Union, even though India ostensibly professed non-alignment. The Indo-Soviet relationship enabled Indian armed forces and its economy to have hardware and economic support.

In my view, Pakistan at the time had no other option. During president Ayub Khan’s military rule of one decade the strategic partnership with the West was cemented through SEATO and CENTO. Pakistan became a key Western ally in the Cold War against the communist bloc. Ayub Khan convinced the US administration of the centrality of Pakistan’s strategic position. As a result, massive military and economic aid flowed in, which strengthened Pakistan’s defence and its economy. Pakistan was seen to be the fortress of US vested interests in South Asia and the Far East. He was the first Pakistani leader who was seen as a reliable western ally against its war on communism.

Now coming to the mistakes. It was a monumental blunder on Ayub Khan’s part to go to war against India in 1965, hoping vainly for the solution to the Kashmir dispute. This was a deeply flawed war started by Pakistan on faulty assumptions which were: (a) US arms supply would continue during the war; (b) India would not cross the international border.

The futility of this war is obvious and the damage it did to Pakistan as a western ally was massive.

Suddenly it was realized in the West that Ayub Khan was not pursuing an anti-communist western agenda, but was working for his own causes — Kashmir being one of them.

Their military support to Pakistan was not intended to be used against India. As a result, not only did Ayub Khan lose out on his credentials as a western ally, but Pakistan also suffered a lot. Ayub Khan then had to face a humiliating diplomatic failure at Tashkent. The West never really trusted Pakistan after that as a strategic partner.

The second blunder, again made by a military ruler — Yahya Khan — was to allow Pakistan to drift into a civil war, which resulted in the 1971 war. In this war several disastrous assumptions played out its follies: (a) China would bring its forces on Indian borders; (b) Yahya opened the western front to release the pressure in East Pakistan; (c) US intervention through the pacific fleet would prevent India from attacking East Pakistan. None of these things happened.

Q. But you can’t say that it’s a story of defeats and failures all along.

A. Yes. I’ll also address that point. When Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was in power, there were some remarkable successes in the field of foreign policy. For example, it was in that period that the Shimla Accord was signed. It was also during his tenure that Pakistan became an important member of the non-aligned world. And because of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the oil embargo and the OIC summit in Lahore, Pakistan became one of the principal players in the Muslim and the non-aligned world.

That was also the start of Pakistan’s ambitious nuclear programme in reply to India’s nuclear test at Pokhran in 1974. But this five-year golden period of Pakistan’s foreign policy came to an end with the removal of Bhutto from power by Gen Ziaul Haq.

Q. As far as foreign policy is concerned, how was Gen Zia’s period different from that of Ayub Khan’s?

A. Gen Zia was a military ruler seeking western legitimacy so that under his leadership Pakistan could play a role in world affairs. This opportunity to Pakistan came with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Suddenly, Pakistan was at the centrestage of the great game played during the Cold War. And opportunity had presented itself to the US to strike a mortal blow at the evil empire of communism and avenge the defeat in Vietnam. Without committing a single soldier, the US administration conducted a 10-year covert war to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

By 1988, it had become pretty clear that the Soviets had exhausted themselves in Afghanistan. The Geneva Accord of 1988 gave the Soviets an exit strategy out of Afghanistan, but nothing to Pakistan. Pakistan had hosted 3.2 million Afghan refugees, made its ISI available to conduct the covert war and put all its resources to the service of Jihad. In the process, Pakistan was given some crumbs for this massive involvement. These crumbs amounted to $3.2 billion for five years. Undoubtedly, the military assistance strengthened Pakistan’s defence capability. But in terms of economy it made very little difference. Considering that Pakistan was the only available country to fight the free world’s covert war, the trade off for Pakistan was pathetic. However, perhaps the only gain for Pakistan was that the Reagan administration looked the other way when Pakistan developed its nuclear programme. As a result, Pakistan was able to complete the nuclear enrichment cycle and produce substantial quantities of bomb grade uranium 235.

This significant development nullified India’s nuclear advantage. Although India had already tested a crude nuclear device, both countries pursued a policy of nuclear ambiguity. In the pursuit of the Afghan war, Gen Zia had obtained from the US a carte blanche for the supply of weapons and money exclusively to the Afghan Mujahideen.

Gen Zia made many mistakes as far as the Afghan policy goes. For example:

(1) His total reliance on right wing conservative Islamist parties, which mostly pursued the Saudi brand of Wahabi Islam, was a blunder. Presumably, he did so because of his own denominational inclination and the Saudi money that was flowing in.

(2) Massive support to Ahmed Shah Masood and Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani and their allies. Masood and Rabbani represented only 18 per cent of the Afghan population, which meant that the Tajik nationality concentrated largely in the north-eastern regions of Panjsher and Badakhshan.

(3) His regime chose Engr Hekmatyar as the principal Pukhtoon commander for Afghanistan. He, too, was lavished with massive arms and money assistance. Hekmatyar, as was proved later, was a rigid Wahabi fundamentalist and was not recognized in the heartland of the Pukhtoon tribal society. (4) There was fear in the ISI, generated no doubt by Gen Hameed Gul, that a popular Pukhtoon leader amongst the Mujahideen would one day raise the issue of Pukhtoonistan.

(5) Pakistan refused to support any moderate parties in the Pukhtoon or other areas which were represented by the monarchists. The thinking was that they would follow Zahir Sha’s anti-Pakistan policy.

(6) Finally, all manners of militant Jihadis and even criminals from the Muslim world were invited, and indeed welcomed, to fight the Afghan Jihad with total support from the US. The struggle against the Soviet occupation was actually called Jihad by Congressmen Charlie Wilson.

The other failures of Pakistan’s Afghan policy were the mishandling of the Jalalabad Accord, the Peshawar Accord and the Islamabad Accord between the warring Mujahideen factions.

Q. What about the policy pursued by Mian Nawaz Sharif on the Afghanistan issue?

A. In fact, everybody played their role in adding to the blunders. It was in 1991, when Mian Nawaz Sharif appointed an inexperienced person — Gen Javed Nasir — as director-general of the powerful ISI. The new person didn’t have a clue to the complexities of the Afghan situation. He simply pursued Gen Hameed Gul’s bonapartist approach to Afghanistan, which had culminated in the fiasco of Jalalabad. As a result of Pakistan’s mismanagement of inter-Afghan rivalries, a civil war was the obvious outcome.

The problem in handling the Afghan policy was that it remained in military hands and was practically run by military minds. A deep political situation in Afghanistan was sought to be resolved not through political but by military means.

The outcome of importing Jihadis into Pakistan and allowing them to set up shops here had serious consequences for Pakistan. The imported local Jihadis were considered a strategic asset by Pakistan’s military thinkers. After 1988, they were exported to occupied Jammu and Kashmir. This process continued into the ’90s till all manner of Jihadi organizations emerged in Pakistan and started exercising the national security veto on Pakistan’s foreign policy. Thousands of young men were recruited from all over Pakistan and helped to fight Jihad in the occupied Kashmir.

This destabilized Pakistan’s internal security and brought the Jihadi organizations to the centrestage of Pakistan. The attitude of the Pakistani establishment was totally opportunistic, because it had privatized and outsourced Jihad. While the state refused to declare Jihad, it encouraged its children to fight in Kashmir. This had international implications apart from the domestic fallout. In the Kashmir case we caused great harm to ourselves by opening Kashmir to non-Kashmiri Jihadis. This provided India with an opportunity to build a case that Pakistan was promoting and abetting terrorism. If the Kashmiris alone had conducted Jihad under the UN Charter, they were within their rights to do so and no country was in a position to raise any objection.

The next grave blunder came in 1999 as the Kargil fiasco. Presumably Gen Musharraf was trying to play nuclear brinkmanship. He was hoping that with the capture of strategic heights in that sector he would be able to cut off the Indian supply line to Laddakh and Leih and the world would come rushing to New Delhi and Islamabad for a mediated settlement of the Kashmir dispute because of the fear of a nuclear war.

Kargil came at a time when prime minister Vajpayee had opened peace process with Pakistan through the Lahore Declaration. This came as a great shock to India and the rest of the world. India was able to strengthen its case before the world that Pakistan was really not interested in peace but wanted military conquest. Pakistan’s case was very badly damaged.

The Kargil crisis had resulted finally in the military takeover by Gen Musharraf. Isolated all over the world, Gen Musharraf was seeking international legitimacy, which presented itself after America’s post 9/11 war on terrorism. Gen Musharraf is pursuing this war with great commitment, which includes Pakistan’s armed forces’ deployment in Fata and other regions. Only history would judge whether he was right and whether Pakistan internally and externally was offered a commensurate quid pro quo.

This analysis illustrates the fact that Pakistan has been a prisoner of military elite’s bonapartist ambitions. They have sought an imposed internal stability of a prisoner of war camp. They did not build any long-term strategic relationship with the West, but made Pakistan available for periodic tactical gains by the US. Every single military ruler was supported by Washington and every one of them sought legitimacy not from the people of Pakistan, but from the US administration. That’s the crux of Pakistan’s foreign policy problems, that is, the military elites’ domination over civil society. Progressively, internal and economic security has been sacrificed in the name of national security. This troubled civil-military relationship has resulted in a fragile economy, an unhappy federation, demoralized society, compromised institutions and a fragmented polity.

If Pakistan wishes for a better tomorrow, its civil society will have to seek an identity in its roots and its armed forces must come under absolute civil control. Short of this, Pakistan’s future is bleak.

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