There is a mixed taste to our American connection: sweet and bitter. Sweet because there is little sense in being on bad terms with the bully on the block; bitter because of the unequal nature of this relationship.
Imagine a gorilla (King Kong, if you will) in what we love to call a “strategic” partnership with a smaller monkey. Unless smaller monkeys have hidden strengths yet to be discovered by wildlife experts, the partnership will pull in the gorilla’s direction.
When September 11 happened, shaking our military leadership out of their 20-year old Afghan trance, falling in with American wishes was the right thing to do. The skeletons in our cupboard left them with no other option.
Whatever holy warriors of the Hamid Gul and Aslam Beg variety may say, and you must hand it to them for being consistently incurable, our Afghan policy, with its crowning glory the rise of the Taliban, was a disaster. If the guardians of national security were now changing course, albeit under foreign pressure, it was for the best. Only problem is we went overboard.
The Americans wanted us to bend. We fell on our knees, our zeal on the rebound taking us beyond the call of duty or even necessity.
Even the Americans were surprised. They were in no mood to take ‘no’ for an answer but they weren’t quite expecting the lengths to which Pakistan’s military rulers went to meet their demands. What’s more, the Americans remain surprised, our passion in their service as strong as ever.
What is the American interest in Pakistan? It is basically two-fold. (1) The re-invention of the Pakistan army, so that instead of focusing on India, it should train its binoculars on the badlands along the Pakistan-Afghan border, a necessary pre-requisite for the American pacification of Afghanistan. (2) In the name of non-proliferation, stripping the veil from our nuclear secrets.
On both counts we haven’t done badly. Peace with India and forsaking the cause of ‘jihad’ in Kashmir are corollaries of turning westwards. Both are good steps because whatever partisans of the jihadi school of thought may say, helping the Kashmir insurgency was not a policy that could be sustained over the long-term. It also had a blowback effect in that jihadi elements within Pakistan were spinning out of control.
Besides, while no closer to liberating Kashmir or forcing India to the negotiating table, our Kashmir policy (in tandem with our love for the Taliban) was earning Pakistan a reputation as one of the cockpits of international jihad. But it is salutary to remember that while peace with India was a long overdue policy, the push for it came not from homegrown wisdom but American tutelage, one of the positive aspects of our American connection.
We weave the strangest paradoxes. It was the military behind the Afghan and Kashmir jihads and the military, or its supreme commander, now vigorously applying the soap of “enlightened moderation” to give Pakistan a new image. Spend a decade if not more creating one set of problems, then another decade in solving those problems.
The military command spends the better part of five years damning the mainstream political parties and helping the mullah’s rise to power in the Frontier and Balochistan. Now the same military command woos the mainstream parties and denounces the mullahs for ‘extremism’. First beget misfortune and then fight it, the military’s idea of nation-building.
On the nuclear question too the Americans can’t be displeased with our performance. Even if we make Dr A. Q. Khan a national and international scapegoat, saying he acted on his own and was the only culprit, this whole saga amounts to a huge exercise in self-incrimination. What’s worse, we just can’t leave this subject alone.
We have Shaikh Rashid ‘Einstein’ Ahmed’s statement that Dr Khan provided a used centrifuge to Iran. Pray, how did he do that? By stuffing it in his shirt pocket and handing it to the ayatollahs in some back alley of Tehran? And as if ‘Einstein’ Ahmed wasn’t enough, we have President Musharraf saying, no, Dr Khan merely provided some centrifuge parts to Tehran.
Come off it, why don’t we take a tip from the Israelis and learn to be discreet about this subject? Whatever info the Americans may have, why do we have to shoot off our mouths in public?
True, we are denying the Americans direct access to Dr Khan. But is this out of a delicate regard for national honour or because of self-protection? Grilled by the Americans who can tell what beans Dr Khan may spill and whom he might not implicate?
Dr Khan’s plight, however, is obscuring the real issue. Dr Khan himself is a spent force, living on borrowed time, alive in body but perhaps dead in spirit. Although we owe it to ourselves not to let the Americans get anywhere near him, more important than Khan’s person is the status of our nuclear programme.
Other things may be wrapped in secrecy but this much we know that the Khan saga, and the coercion applied to Khan’s closest associates, have demoralized if not put the fear of God in Pakistan’s nuclear community, the small band of dedicated men who against the odds made Pakistan a nuclear power. So it is relevant to ask whether in the Khan Research Laboratories the centrifuges still spin. The Americans are all over Pakistan now. Would they permit this?
If enriched uranium, the stuff that goes into a nuclear bomb, is no longer being produced, and Pakistan’s nuclear community is in a state bordering on panic, then it obviously means that our nuclear programme, for all practical purposes, is frozen, the labs quiet and the centrifuges out of business.
In 1990 when then Ambassador Oakley conveyed word of impending nuclear-related sanctions — the Symington Amendment, etc — to the Pakistan government, the Americans weren’t saying we smash our centrifuges and bury our enriched uranium in the mountains. They simply wanted a ‘rollback’, an end to enrichment. Are we there or do we still have some cards up our sleeve?
But we want F-16s. Who are the wizards who shape Pakistan’s defence policy? Of what use will so many F-16s be to us when India gets twice or thrice that number? That’s the deal the Americans have in mind. So many F-16s to Pakistan — that is, if this ever comes through — but a much larger number for India, our gains outweighed two or three times over.
Who do we want the F-16s for? The Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Afghans, Iranians, Indians? Instead of being caught up in this new arms race — for, don’t forget, we’ll be paying for the damned machines — we should be telling the Americans that given our status as US ally, the F-16s should be for us only, but if they can’t resist the temptation of selling them to India as well, then far better that neither country should have them.
Far from successfully lobbying against this skewed F-16 deal, our security specialists, to judge by their silence, seem almost to be acquiescing in something far more sinister: the contemplated supply of Patriot missiles to India. Some strategic partnership we have with the US!
When virtually at gunpoint we rallied to the American cause after Sep 11, the argument advanced was that we were protecting Kashmir policy and safeguarding nuclear assets. We know what’s happened on these two fronts.
The actual tradeoff appears to be somewhat different: Pakistan serving American interests while America, happy in this arrangement, gives an encouraging pat on the back to one-man rule.