Islamabad dismayed by 'dithering' US
By Zahid U Kramet
LAHORE - As White House officials continue to debate the call of the United
States' military chief in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, for an
additional force of 40,000 to win the war against Taliban insurgents in the
Afghanistan-Pakistan war theater, the overall impression in Pakistan is that
rather than any decisive victory, the US and the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) are now looking for a face-saving exit to leave Pakistan to
face the brunt of the fallout - once again.
Unsurprisingly then, Pakistan has been guarded about launching committed
strikes against the Taliban holing up in the porous Af-Pak border belts in the
past. And, while it has embarked on a 30,000-strong military mission to crush
the insurgency in its South Waziristan tribal area following attacks on its
security
apparatus in Peshawar, Lahore and Islamabad by suspected Taliban militants,
reservations remain.
On these, Dan Twining pertinently asked last month in an encompassing Foreign
Policy article [1], "Why should the Pakistani military take on the militant
groups that regularly launch cross-border attacks into Afghanistan when the
NATO targets of those attacks will soon slink away?" This is the thought that
holds the public's attention in Afghanistan, and particularly in Pakistan.
Twining pleads the case of the West staying the course in Afghanistan, if
primarily for the reason of "shaping Pakistan's future" when he argues,
"Proponents of drawing down in Afghanistan on the grounds that Pakistan is the
more strategic prize have it only half right: if Pakistan is the strategic
prize, it should be unthinkable not to press for victory in Afghanistan given
the spillover effects of a Western defeat there."
Henry Kissinger, in his Newsweek column "Deployments and diplomacy for
Afghanistan" [2], agrees in principle to a troop ramp, but empathizes with US
President Barack Obama's dilemma, where he could be damned for not acceding to
McChrystal's request for more troops, and damned if he accepts the US
Afghanistan commander's surge request should it fail to deliver on the count of
the "classic anti-insurrection strategy: to build a central government".
Identifying the Taliban and al-Qaeda as a single entity, the feted former US
secretary of state supports a troop surge, after reminding that empowering the
central government in Kabul with overriding authority had failed in the past
due to Afghanistan's "multi-ethnic" tribal composition. But Kissinger also
supports incumbent US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's proposal of bringing
Afghanistan's "neighbors, or near neighbors - Pakistan, India, China, Russia,
Iran" - on board under a new NATO regional umbrella to confront "international
terrorism".
Selig S Harrison in his Boston Globe article titled "Overcoming our failed
strategy in Afghanistan" [3] shares this view, but with a notable difference.
Harrison opts for a dominant Indian position in Kabul and singles out
Pakistan's security agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), as culpable
for India's fear of encirclement "by ISI-supported Islamist forces operating
out of Bangladesh and Nepal as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan", to bring the
proposal under the shadow of clouds.
Here's the other rub: it's NATO's presence that is resented, not just by the
fundamentalist al-Qaeda-Taliban groupings, but arguably by Russia and China,
which have their own anti-insurgency alliance in the the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization. They are hardly likely to consign this alignment to the
backburner and opt for a new understanding under NATO oversight in the region -
especially when they see America's allies weaken in their resolve to combat the
insurgency.
Iran, too, is a closed chapter. After Sunday's bombing of the Iranian
Revolutionary Guards Corps and tribal chiefs meeting in the province of
Sistan-Balochistan, the Guards chief, General Mohammad Jafri, is reported to
have said of Abdul Malik Rigi (the head of the Jundallah group claiming
responsibility for the attack), "Rigi has direct contact with the American and
British intelligence services." General Mohammad Pakpour, commander of the
Guards' ground forces, was equally reprimanding in saying, "The terrorists were
trained in a neighboring country [Pakistan] by the Americans and the British."
With Russia, China and Iran thus practically out of the picture, the US is left
with no option but to fall back on a Pakistan army already tackling the
insurgency on its side of the border. But Pakistan has requested General David
Petraeus, commander US Central Command, to check infiltration into Pakistan,
while its government has asked visiting Senator John Kerry, on a visit
Islamabad to clear the air on the Kerry-Lugar grant, to expedite payment of the
Coalition Support Fund for the "war on terror" to be effectively pursued.
Meantime, Pakistan has come under siege with the recent "Godless, kill in God's
name" attack on Islamabad's International Islamic University, where eight were
killed, three of them young women, and 29 wounded. With the public dazed by
this happening and wondering whether this was an expression of fundamentalist
antipathy toward co-education across the board, or whether this was tooled by
out-of-state-actors suspected by many as the cause of the unrest, the
government had no choice but to order the closure of all schools and colleges
across the country.
Almost unanimous in their condemnation of the US intervention in Afghanistan
for the rise of the Taliban at the outset, Pakistan's analysts questioned the
worth of a US troop surge. Former Pakistan ambassador to the US and Britain, Dr
Maleeha Lodhi, for one, warned a US Senate Committee that a troop escalation in
Afghanistan would have a negative effects on Pakistan, but summarily dismissed
"a cut and run" policy. She recommended instead "a comprehensive strategy with
political, economic and military components" aimed at a political solution.
Around the same time, an editorial in The Wall Street Journal quoted Pakistan's
Foreign Minister [4], Shah Mehmood Quereshi, saying in response to a question
on a US pullout from Afghanistan, "This will be disastrous. You will lose
credibility. If you go in, why are you going out without getting the job done?
Why did you spend so many billion dollars and lose so many lives? Why did we
ally with you?" And regarding the consequences, he predicted "more suicide
bombings" with an emboldened Taliban, no longer pressed by coalition forces,
knocking at Islamabad's doors.
This view pervades Pakistan's government circles and when such sages as the
Brookings Institute's Bruce Riedel, interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman of the
Council on Foreign Relations, present the perspective of an Obama perplexed
over "How many troops? For what purpose? Where will they be deployed? What are
the rules of engagement?" it does nothing to restore the confidence of a
besieged regional ally.
In short, the fine line between "rethinking" and "dithering" to which Riedel
refers, is fast fading and Obama needs to strategize on his Afghan policy now
if he wants to make an impact.
Zahid U Kramet, a Lahore-based political analyst specializing in
Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, is the founder of the research and analysis
website the Asia Despatch.
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