BOOK
REVIEW Anti-India agenda costs Pakistan
dearly Pakistan on the
Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan and
Afghanistan by Ahmed Rashid
Reviewed by Brian M Downing
With the United States ensnarled in the
Afghan insurgency and Pakistan headed toward
implosion, AfPak and the countries around it are
in crisis.
Renowned journalist Ahmed
Rashid offers a series of essays drawn from his
connections to figures in the state, army, and
insurgent groups which succinctly and engagingly
analyze the regional troubles. His insights are
remarkable, his candor and courage all the more
so. As he notes more than once, the Pakistani army
has been known to treat roughly, or even kill,
turbulent journalists - including in all
likelihood Asia Times Online
Pakistan bureau chief
Syed Saleem Shahzad last May.
Pakistani
political and military elites, he argues, have
failed their country in four interrelated regards.
First, they have failed to build a national
identity embracing the Pashtun, Punjabi, Sindhi,
and Baloch ethnic groups. The military has instead
only built an identity based on opposition to
India, while militants have recently begun
building an Islamist one.
Second, elites
have fixated on national security and allocated
exorbitant funds upon the military at the expense
of education, healthcare, and infrastructure - a
predilection that civilian leaders dare not
challenge. Third, elites have encouraged or at
least tolerated jihadi groups that strike targets
in the region and occasionally turn on Pakistan as
well.
Fourth, elites have allowed the
country to fragment along ethnic lines. Punjabis
are over-represented in the army and state to the
resentment of other peoples. The Balochs have
begun their fifth insurgency and many Pashtun
tribes are at war with the government.
With its politicians drawn from corrupt
family dynasties and its generals obsessed with
their immense budgets, the country has failed to
develop politically or economically. While India
and other countries in the region have won places
in the global market, Pakistan's belligerent
policies in Afghanistan and Kashmir have cut the
country off from commerce with Central Asia and
India. Much of its industry remains state-owned
and uncompetitive. The two foes could have
benefited from trade. Instead, India has developed
exports in manufactured goods and technology;
Pakistan is still selling rice and cotton.
Rashid has long argued that the army
supports the Afghan Taliban and he makes his
strongest case here. Though nominally supportive
of US/International Security Assistance Forces
efforts in Afghanistan, Pakistan's then ruler
General Pervez Musharraf was dismayed by the
Pashtun Taliban's ouster in late 2001 and the
attendant rise of northern peoples tied to India.
Musharraf was certain that India and its northern
allies would seek to destabilize Pakistan's
Pashtun and Baloch borderlands, endangering
Pakistan's territorial integrity.
Musharraf reasoned that the US would soon
tire of Afghanistan, all the more so once it had
invaded Iraq (2003) and a bitter insurgency soon
developed. Better to back the Taliban and guide
them back to power. Pakistani intelligence
(Inter-Services Intelligence - ISI) helped secure
funding for the Taliban from wealthy Gulf donors
and built camps for their fighters in northern
Balochistan, not far from Quetta where Taliban
leaders were safely ensconced.
Rashid is
also sharply critical of the US, especially of
President Barack Obama whom he sees as even less
interested in AfPak than his predecessor. George W
Bush, Rashid rather puzzlingly insists, showed
considerable interest in Afghanistan; Obama handed
off AfPak to others, especially the military,
where artfulness in political development and
diplomacy is limited and where reliance on force
is not. Whether Afghanistan's lack of priority is
true of the new administration as a whole or just
the president, who after all faces pressing
economic problems, is unclear - probably
deliberately so.
The new administration
began with high hopes of negotiating a broad
regional settlement, including the decades-long
conflict over Kashmir. But when India objected to
linking Kashmir to the war in Afghanistan, the
Obama administration backed down. This fueled a
new wave of conspiratorial speculation inside
Pakistan: Indians had become the Israelis of the
region, lavished upon by gullible Americans, and
Pakistanis were becoming the Palestinians of South
Asia, innocent victims of foreign lobbies and
nefarious intrigues.
Rashid argues that it
was a bad idea for the US to insist on elections
in Afghanistan back in 2009. As much as this goes
against the faith in democratic processes, he
makes strong points. The Afghan parliament was
essentially functionless, the parties were weak
and not well known, and the public was more
attached to well established patronage networks
than to newly-minted political processes.
United States pressure for candidates to
run against President Hamid Karzai convinced him
that Washington was determined to unseat him. He
responded by rigging the election with the help of
warlords, drug racketeers, and a legion of corrupt
officials who wished to retain their jobs. Owing
to the strength of the insurgency in the south,
the Pashtun vote was low and the non-Pashtun
northerners enjoyed disproportionate success,
which had the adverse consequence of strengthening
ethnic mistrust.
Rashid looks at attempts
at counterinsurgency in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Although a Pakistani army study in 2000 saw
serious internal dangers, the generals refused to
reorient from conventional warfare with India to
counterinsurgency efforts toward internal groups.
A few years later, the US pressed Pakistan
to retrain two divisions (about 45,000 troops) of
its 29 divisions to conduct counter-insurgency
campaigns in Pashtun tribal regions against the
Taliban. The army, however, refused, citing the
need to defend against an Indian invasion, which
of course is highly unlikely now that Pakistan has
nuclear weapons.
The US was only able to
retrain Frontier Corps units - Pashtun tribal
units that stretch along the Durand Line. This
proved short-lived as the special forces advisers
were ordered out of the country after the US raid
on Osama bin Laden's home near an army compound in
Pakistan in May of 2011.
The US was able
to persuade the army to go after militant groups
in the tribal areas of South Waziristan, but the
operations did not use counterinsurgency
techniques. They relied instead on heavy
firepower, which caused large numbers of civilian
casualties and turned more locals against them.
To the north in Afghanistan, American
counter-insurgency efforts have not brought
appreciable success. There is little economic
activity unrelated to the war or foreign doles.
The enclaves carved out of former Taliban areas
aren't secure and locals are reluctant to
cooperate with the US or Kabul officials.
Indigenous military units are not effective.
The army and police have high desertion
rates and exhibit no fighting spirit. General
David Petraeus pressed hard for building up local
militias and won, despite Karzai's opposition to
what he thought would become more warlord bands.
Thus far, these militias have accomplished nothing
as they are viewed with suspicion by locals.
Karzai's state remains both corrupt and
inept. Ten years after the Taliban's ouster, many
districts do not have a government court. Taliban
courts have established themselves there.
Rashid sees the Taliban leadership as
war-weary, perhaps even more so than their
opponents. It was the Taliban, after all, who
approached the US for peace talks. ISI, however,
opposes peace until its regional agenda on India
and Kashmir is guaranteed to be a central part of
negotiations. Last year, ISI arrested the
Taliban's second in command, Mullah Baradar, as he
was embarking on peace talks that the generals had
not approved.
As a result of at least
somewhat diverging interests with the Taliban, the
generals may be placing more emphasis on the
Haqqani network, an insurgent group which is only
partially integrated into the Taliban and which
has been close to ISI since the old days of the
Soviet war. The Haqqanis are thought responsible
for most of the assassinations, suicide bombings,
and terrorist strikes into major cities -
including the coordinated attacks in Kabul and
other cities last week. (As an insurgent offensive
has recently begun, it will be interesting to see
if the Taliban send signals through relative
inaction in the south, contrasting with Haqqani
boldness in the east.)
The Taliban's
war-weariness and their disagreements with ISI
offer some prospects for negotiations in the near
term. Rashid suggests that the Taliban and the US
negotiate a confidence-building arrangement
whereby the US foregoes the night raids on Taliban
commanders and the Taliban forego the
assassinations of government officials. In this
respect, Rashid offers some hope in his bleak yet
compelling account of the region.
Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of
America, Pakistan and Afghanistan by Ahmed
Rashid. (New York: Viking, 2012). ISBN-10:
0670023469. Price US$26.95, 256 pages.
Brian M Downing is a
political/military analyst and author of The
Military Revolution and Political Change
and The Paths of Glory: War and Social Change in
America from the Great War to Vietnam. He can
be reached at brianmdowning@gmail.com.
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online
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