Page 3 of 3 'We're not going to win this war'
By China Hand
headquarters of Pakistan's Anti-Terrorist Force in the capital of Islamabad:
A
letter recovered from the gift basket read, "If Pakistan does not separate
itself from the American crusade on Muslims, these sort of attacks shall
continue."
Despite brave chest-beating in the national press
about the need to make the war on terror Pakistan's war, it appears that the
Taliban has done a very good job of convincing Pakistani opinion that peace in
the heartland and accommodation on the borderlands is preferable to a titanic
struggle against intermeshed
Pashtun and Islamic conservative interests.
An in-camera session of Pakistan's parliament meant to rally the political
parties behind the pro-US/anti-terror initiatives of the civilian government
led by Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party turned into a humiliating
demonstration that the government lacked the credibility or authority to lead
the nation.
Radical Islamic parties openly questioned the premise of a Pakistani war on
terror and demanded that the Taliban be allowed to present their side of the
story to parliament.
The powerful democratic party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz -led by Nawaz
Sharif, arguably the most popular political figure in Pakistan, refused to make
any constructive contribution to the debate on the government's behalf - a
telling indication that the PPP government is profoundly isolated both from
conservative and moderate Pakistani opinion on the issue.
Undoubtedly, Sharif calculates that, as the United States slides toward
accommodation with the Afghan Taliban, any calls for all-out war on the
Pakistan Taliban will become practically and politically untenable.
On October 17, Saeed Shah reported in The Guardian:
"The majority of
the people of Pakistan do not see it as our war. We are fighting for somebody
else and we are suffering because of that," said Tariq Azim, a former minister
in the previous government of Pervez Musharraf, whose party now sits in the
opposition. "At the moment the only ones toeing the line are the People's
party."
Members of parliament are particularly angered by recent signals from
Washington that it is prepared to talk to the Afghan Taliban, while telling
Pakistan that it must fight its Taliban menace. "They [the US] are showing a
lot more flexibility on their side of the border," said Khurram Dastagir, a
member of parliament for Sharif's party. "The US are trying to externalize
their failure in Afghanistan by dumping it on us."
Asif
Zardari, widower of Benazir Bhutto, co-chairman of the PPP and president of
Pakistan, has staked his political fortunes on splitting with the other
democratic parties after the parliamentary election and replacing Pervez
Musharraf as America's client in Pakistan.
However, hamstrung by unpopular policies, confronted by a ruthless and militant
insurgency, and dogged by a popular and wily rival, Zardari appears incapable
of delivering the counter-terrorism results in the border areas that America is
looking for.
And Zardari may have signed his political death warrant by temporarily closing
the Torkham border crossing in September into Afghanistan to NATO fuel truck
traffic, reportedly as a protest to placate Pakistani military and popular
opinion infuriated by the flagrant and repeated US ground and drone incursions
in Pakistan.
The Torkham border crossing is at the Khyber Pass and the terminus of the
fabled Grand Trunk Road, the immense and ancient artery of travel and trade
that crossed British India all the way from Calcutta to the border of
Afghanistan.
Torkham is on the only road to Kabul from Pakistan (the only other high volume
border crossing, at Chaman, far south in Balochistan, feeds into the Taliban
heartland of Kandahar) and serves as the conduit for fully 70% of NATO's
supplies, which travel by ship to Karachi, are trucked up the Indus Valley,
climb a long, winding, and perilous route through the frontier territories to
Torkham, and then roll down a heavily protected corridor to Kabul.
Closing Torkham is critical matter. I don't think Musharraf ever did it,
because he understood that America's massive financial subvention to Pakistan
wasn't meant to buy the mobilization of his indifferent army or his equivocal
intelligence services - it was to assure a reliable, protected conduit for NATO
materiel through Pakistan to Afghanistan.
When, after 9/11, Richard Armitage allegedly threatened to bomb Pakistan back
into the Stone Age if it didn't cooperate in the GWOT and help destroy its
clients in Kabul - he was probably thinking about getting Pakistan to
facilitate the massive flow of fuel and equipment through Torkham.
No doubt when Zardari closed the border crossing, calculators rattled to life
in officers throughout the Pentagon as spooks and logistics officers ran the
numbers to decide if the immense cost of airlifting NATO supplies to
Afghanistan would be a better deal than pumping $1.2 billion per year in
subsidies into the pockets of a feckless and unreliable client like Zardari.
Pakistan is finding itself hopelessly on the wrong side of the regional
strategic equation, both in its border regions and across the Durand Line in
Afghanistan.
Beyond its traditional intelligence and diplomatic ties to the Taliban,
Pakistan's enthusiasm for the US-led campaign against the Afghan Taliban is
also tempered by the awareness that its archenemy India has rushed into
Afghanistan under US and UK cover after the invasion to make hay at Pakistan's
expense.
India made the decision to participate in Afghanistan's reconstruction and has
opened four consulates in Mazar e Sharif, Jalalabad, Kandahar, and Herat with
the idea of what is known euphemistically as enhancing its strategic depth, a
decision that terrifies and infuriates Pakistan. A report on
Rupee News construed India's presence in Afghanistan as 107
"consulates" in which 20 intelligence units are burning their midnight oil to
destabilize Pakistan.
In an unhappy piece of symbolism, at almost the same time that Zardari was
cutting off Kabul's lifeline at the Khyber Pass to the west, India's signature
infrastructure project in Afghanistan was completed: 218-km Delaram-Zaranj road
connecting Afghanistan's "Garland Highway", which loops through all of the
country's major cities, to a customs crossing at the Iranian border and from
there down to the Iranian port of Chabahar.
Constructed by a 400-man team of the Indian government's Border Roads
Organization (BRO) - a military department analogous to the US Army Corps of
Engineers tasked with construction of strategic infrastructure, the project was
funded as a donation by the Indian government and took five years to complete.
Despite the protection of India's Indo-Tibetan Border Police, multiple attacks
by the Taliban claimed the lives of at least five Indian BRO staff and 62
Afghan policemen.
The $80 million project carries with it the joint hope of three of Pakistan's
enemies - the Karzai government, India, and Iran - that the road will wean
landlocked Afghanistan away from its reliance on Pakistan's Karachi-to-Khyber
conduit, challenge Pakistan's massive Gwadar port project (built just down the
coast from Chabahar with $200 million in Chinese aid) as the gateway to central
Asia and the Middle East, and further weaken Pakistan's position in
Afghanistan.
Pakistan regards the entrenched Indian presence in Afghanistan as a threat to
its west tolerated by the United States, which has cultivated India, most
markedly through a highly concessionary bilateral nuclear agreement, as a
large, prospering, and stable counterweight to China's economic and military
clout in Asia.
India has little natural constituency of its own in 99% Muslim Afghanistan and
would suffer a swift and brutal erasure of its influence if the pro-Pakistan
Taliban were to return to power; but it appears that the United States is
prepared to support India's interests now and presumably in whatever
dispensation is negotiated with the Taliban.
When the United States passed on to the Indian government information that
Pakistan's intelligence agency was implicated in the bombing of the Indian
embassy in Kabul - and leaked the accusation to the press - Pakistan must have
seen the handwriting on the wall.
The fundamentals simply aren't there for Pakistan to be a sincere or effective
participant in US security goals either in west Pakistan or in Afghanistan, and
the United States is no longer pretending that it is. More important, however,
is the fragility of the Pakistan government, with the US adding to the internal
pressures.
In a sign that Asif Zardari's lack of enthusiasm and effectiveness have become
a terminal problem, the key points of a pessimistic upcoming National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was leaked to the press - an assessment prepared to
support General Petraeus's review.
Perhaps General Petraeus wanted his NIE both bleak and leaked in preparation
for the upcoming foreign policy/national security tussle for the incoming
president's attention.
In another sign of what is, for Republicans, probably a sign of the approaching
apocalypse, the NIE findings were leaked to the liberal-leaning McClatchy News
Service's Jonathan Landay and John Walcott, and not to the Washington Times or
even the Washington Post:
A US official who participated in drafting
the top secret National Intelligence Estimate said it portrays the situation in
Pakistan as "very bad". Another official called the draft "very bleak", and
said it describes Pakistan as being "on the edge".
The first official summarized the estimate's conclusions about the state of
Pakistan as: "no money, no energy, no government".
Translation:
in the forthcoming debate about Pakistan in the new presidential term, there
will be no happy talk about our plucky partner in the so-called "war on
terror". There will be grim hand wringing about how to keep Pakistan from
dragging down US efforts to preserve Operation Enduring Freedom's fruits of
victory.
The choices before Petraeus will presumably be to 1) ignore the facts on the
ground and persist in previously unsuccessful attempts to bribe, threaten, or
cajole Pakistan's civilian regime to provide effective support in the border
regions; 2) wash his hands of Pakistan and let Islamabad cut loose from the
Afghan effort and make its separate peace with the Pakistani Taliban; or 3)
roll the dice with a new, more capable, and enthusiastic client insulated from
the democratic entanglements of the civilian government - for example, a new
round of military rule.
Given the likelihood that a Taliban with safe havens inside Pakistan is
unlikely to put the Afghan government and NATO in the "position of strength"
that Britain's General Richards believes is a necessary pre-condition for
talks, it is quite possible that the United States will look at the turmoil and
division in the Zardari administration, recoil at the possibility that new
elections will elevate Nawaz Sharif - a client of Saudi Arabia and strongly
committed to decoupling from the US "war on terror" and negotiations with the
Taliban - to power, and find itself encouraging a Pakistani general to step
forward and to implement the policies that the United States believes
necessary.
And, when one considers that Petraeus might find it desirable - as the British
ambassador already believes - to have a boss with genuine military heft replace
Karzai in Kabul in order to affirm the authority and credibility of the Afghan
government, the US may be faced with the ironic choice of eliminating two South
Asian democracies in the name of a continued struggle to bring freedom to the
region.
If the objective of Petraeus' struggle turns out to be merely to gain the
advantage in a negotiated settlement with the Taliban forces we swore to
destroy after 9/11, the irony will be deep - and, to many, bitter.
China Hand is the author of the Asian affairs website
China Matters which provides continuing updates on US-Afghan policies.
He wrote this article for Japan Focus. Posted on October 21, 2008.
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