Pakistan stares at Bush's
pledges By MK Bhadrakumar
It overshadowed a shake-up of Barack
Obama's top security team and the mowing down of
nine American servicemen at Kabul airport by an
irate Afghan. The Wall Street Journal reported on
Wednesday that Pakistan Prime Minister Yousaf Raza
Gilani had counseled Afghan President Hamid Karzai
to throw off the American yoke and enter a new
sphere of geopolitics in which Afghanistan,
Pakistan and China would live happily ever after.
In "Karzai to dump US", the WSJ reported
that Karzai was in two minds over which road to
take. Perhaps he is probing as to whether the
Pakistani overture could be used to extract better
terms of patronage from Washington.
The
WSJ story had three important points:
The Afghans without exception are a bunch of
bazaariswho at
the end of the day are
moonlighting for profitable deals from whichever
patron without any scruples or honor.
Pakistan is in a confrontational mood with the
US and a "point of no return" has been reached.
China is straining at the leash to move into
Afghanistan's blood-soaked civil war and to pick
up the stirrups from where the Americans might
leave them if and when they are finally booted out
by Karzai or by the force of circumstance.
Karzai knows his way around All
three contentions are highly tendentious. Consider
the following. Of all three protagonists in the
WSJ story, it is Karzai who is most fed up with
the Americans. He knows the Americans have been
trying their damndest for the past two years to
remove him from the Afghan chessboard. He remains
in the presidential palace only because the Barack
Obama administration is stuck with him for want of
an alternative.
Karzai is fully aware that
Washington has been openly patronizing - with
possible funding and political support -
implacable adversaries like his former Afghan
intelligence chief Mohammed Saleh and his former
foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah.
Karzai
is equally aware that Washington has been covertly
encouraging non-Pashtun elements of the erstwhile
Northern Alliance to challenge and erode Karzai's
agenda of reconciliation with the Taliban.
Washington has carried matters to such an extent
that it has spread calumnies about Karzai and his
family - even to the point of insinuating that the
Afghan president is a drug addict and a mental
case.
Such below-the-belt attacks on a
proud Pashtun tribal chieftain leave indelible
marks on his psyche; they are deeply wounding;
they demean him in front of his tribe and his
people; they are antithetical to the culture of
the people who inhabit the Hindu Kush.
Most important, Washington is completely
exasperated with Karzai's seeming incapacity or
lack of will to wrap up a status of forces
agreement (SFA) that would ensure a continued
American troop presence in Afghanistan. The US has
spent hundreds of millions of dollars bringing the
Soviet-era military bases in Afghanistan to a par
with American standards, and constructing new
military bases. Now it is a case of
"all-dressed-up-with-nowhere-to-go".
The
entire Pentagon strategy in Afghanistan pivots on
the conclusion of a SFA. The US objective is to
build up reconciliation with the Taliban on the
foundations of an SFA. This hope is that while
American troops will no longer have to fight and
die in a futile war, the US can perpetuate a
military presence on the strategic Afghan
chessboard and stay neatly tucked in between four
nuclear powers (five, if one includes Iran).
However, the US knows that none of the
regional powers - including India - would
reconcile with the prospect of an open-ended
American military presence in the region. Most
important, Washington knows the Afghan people
would oppose tooth and nail any such foreign
occupation of their country and, therefore, Karzai
wouldn't easily play ball, either.
The US
has been plainly ignoring Karzai's sensitivities
regarding Washington bypassing his government in
vital matters such as aid or excessive security
operations. Karzai isn't a fool and knows that
even a recent controversy regarding Kabul Bank has
an extra political dimension. He does not have to
be reminded that the Americans have been inciting
the Afghan parliament to be a counterpoint to his
presidential authority and to constantly create
roadblocks for him.
In sum, Washington's
equations with Karzai are in a bottomless pit
already and the latter doesn't need Gilani to
enlighten him about the highhandedness, stupidity
or arrogance - depending on one's point of view -
of American policy in the AfPak region. Worse
still, Obama keeps him at arm's length.
China won't take risks The
biggest surprise in the WSJ story is regarding
China. Anyone who has a remote knowledge of
Chinese policy in Afghanistan or any of the
planet's "hotspots" - be it the Thai-Cambodian
border region, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen or Myanmar -
knows that Beijing treads extremely warily when it
comes to spending its resources and political
capital. On the contrary, husbanding resources and
remaining highly focused on core concerns, vital
interests and its economic development has been an
unfailing feature of China's neighborhood policies
all over Central Asia.
This is why despite
constant US urgings for the past three years to
come into the Hindu Kush and to play the role of a
"stakeholder", Beijing hasn't shown the least bit
of interest. A minimal aid program; a commercially
sensible investment program; excellent
government-to-governmental ties; a watchful eye on
the progress of the US strategy - these are the
firm cornerstones of China's Afghan policy.
Beijing is clear-headed about the range of
security threats that arise or can possibly arise
out of Afghanistan. And it has made the
appropriate diplomatic and political moves both
bilaterally with Kabul and Islamabad as well as
regionally within the ambit of the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization to ensure that China's
national security interests are safeguarded.
Finally, China is keeping its options open
in the highly fluid Afghan situation. In the
ultimate analysis, China will deal with any regime
that emerges out of the current civil war. As far
as China is concerned, it is a matter of the
wishes of the Afghan people and China's focus will
be on strengthening the ties with the established
government in Kabul that enjoys international
legitimacy.
In sum, Gilani would have been
out of his mind to prescribe to Karzai a "Chinese
option". Grant it to the Pakistanis to know that
much about their "all-weather friend", China.
Therefore, the WSJ article raises
disturbing questions. As Vladimir Lenin would have
asked: "Who stands to gain?" The question is not
really a hard one to answer. The article is
calculated to raise hopes in Karzai's mind that
Uncle Sam may consider paying a better price if he
collaborates on the SFA. Curiously, the WSJ
article appeared even as the US special envoy to
Afghanistan and Pakistan, Marc Grossman (who is
the point person negotiating the SFA from the
American side) arrived in New Delhi.
The
specter of a potential Sino-Pakistan axis in
Afghanistan is calculated to raise hackles in the
Indian mind and goad it into making precipitate
counter-moves in the Hindu Kush. But the Indians
would need to be downright naive to bite the
American bullet.
Anyway, Indian Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh is visiting Kabul next
week and can hear the tale straight from the
horse's mouth. New Delhi is confident that it
enjoys transparency in its discourses with Karzai
and can ask a few pertinent questions rather than
go with Grossman's version or the WSJ account.
US double-crosses Pakistan What
the WSJ report really does is illustrate the state
of play in US-Pakistan relations. The fact is that
as much as Washington will claim that tensions
emanate from Pakistan's clandestine links with the
Haqqani network, it is crystal clear that the
issue is actually about the bottom line of the
impending Afghan peace talks.
Plainly put,
Islamabad is increasingly apprehensive about US
strategy in Afghanistan. It gets an ugly feeling
that the US is working on an agenda that would
have profound meaning for Pakistan's future and
Islamabad is being kept in the dark.
It is
simplistic to call this a mere "trust deficit".
Through the six-week-long, gruelling interrogation
of Raymond Davis, when the US Central Intelligence
Agency contractor was being held in Lahore, the
Pakistani military has garnered all that it was
afraid to ask the Pentagon and the CIA, and all
that it needed to know about the American
gameplan.
The Pakistani military and the
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) have a fair idea
today about the extensive American intelligence
infiltration of the Taliban and the various
Pakistani militant groups. The US is increasingly
effective in its drone attacks due to the
real-time intelligence it is directly gathering.
Suffice to say, the US is getting quite
close to dispensing with the help of the Pakistani
military and the ISI - altogether if a need arises
or at least whittling it down - that was needed to
sustain its dealings with the Taliban and other
militant groups.
But what truly unnerves
the Pakistani military is that incrementally, the
US might be able to use insurgent groups or
elements within them - if it is not doing already,
as Iran has alleged - as instruments of its
regional policies in Afghanistan and in the
surrounding regions.
Thus, the Pakistanis
are demanding that the US work with Pakistan on
the drone attacks and observe the so-called
"Reagan Rules" with regard to dealings with the
insurgent groups has a broader context. The
"Reagan Rules" describe the CIA-ISI relationship
of the 1980s, when the agency provided ISI with
money and arms to aid the mujahideen.
This
is an non-negotiable demand for the Pakistani
military as it concerns Pakistan's sovereignty,
territorial integrity and the safety of its
nuclear stockpiles from American reach. Not the
least, it concerns Pakistan's entire Afghan
strategy, which has been based on the exclusivity
of its ties with the friendly elements of the
Afghan insurgency fostered through the past three
decades at enormous cost and sacrifice and at
considerable risk.
However, it will be
virtually impossible for the US to meet the
Pakistani expectations and to settle for an
operational blueprint that strictly confines to
the four walls of the "Reagan Rules". The current
war is vastly different from the Afghan jihad of
the 1980s.
Thirty years ago, Washington
was settling scores with the Soviet Union for the
humiliation in Vietnam and it was expedient not to
be seen at the barricades. Today, America's
"homeland security" is in the firing line and it
is suicidal not to lead the fight right from out
there in the barricades. Today's war cannot be
reduced to a "proxy war" fought through the ISI
and strictly within the parameters of a
US-Pakistan network of mil-to-mil and intelligence
level collaboration.
The strategic
divergence in the respective strategies and
objectives of the US and Pakistan has finally
welled up to the surface and is visible to the
naked eye. Quite conceivably, Gilani solicited
Karzai's cooperation in moving into a
Pakistan-Afghanistan condominium to steer the
peace process in a rapid sequential way so as to
present the US with a fait accompli.
But
this is a sideshow, and it is patently intended to
display to the Obama administration the imperative
need to recognize Pakistan's legitimate interests
and not to go back on the word given by the
previous George W Bush administration: that in any
Afghan settlement, Pakistan would play a key role
and in any eventual peace settlement, Pakistan's
legitimate interests would be duly accommodated.
The big question is whether Obama or the
administration he heads considers itself to be the
inheritor of all the pledges that Bush or Colin
Powell or Donald Rumsfeld made to the Pakistani
military headed by Pervez Musharraf in the heat of
the night after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
In any case, the Pakistani military should
have known - even if Musharraf chose to overlook
it - that in the American scheme of things, the
winner invariably takes all.
Ambassador
M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in
the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments
included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka,
Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait
and Turkey.
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