US,
Pakistan top brass fire risky
salvos By Karamatullah K Ghori
What has long been rued by all and sundry
as a trust deficit between the United States and
Pakistan - supposedly allies in the "war on
terror" - now threatens to bring down the whole
edifice of the cooperation that the civil and
military leaders of the two countries have
painstakingly built and tried to hold since the US
invaded Afghanistan in 2001.
In the latest
episode of the spat that began between Washington
and Islamabad two months ago with the taking out
of Osama bin Laden by US Navy Seals in a solo
operation in Abbottabad, the two seem to have
locked horns over the use of an air base, called
Shamsi, in the sensitive province of Balochistan.
Pakistan Defense Minister Ahmed Mukhtar on
June 29 announced that his government had asked
the Americans to stop
using Shamsi for drone
attacks against targets inside Pakistan and vacate
the base. Mukhtar was quite categorical and told
Reuters: "We have been talking to them [on the
issue] for some time, but after May 2, we told
them again. When they [US forces] will not operate
from there [Shamsi base], no drone attacks will be
carried out."
However, within 24 hours, US
official sources in Washington also told Reuters
that no US personnel had left the base and there
were no plans for them to do so.
A member
of the Pakistani parliament, retired Lieutenant
General Abdul Qadir Baluch, representing the area
where Shamsi base is located, also confirmed to
Reuters that American personnel were still at the
base.
Such an out-of-hand rejection by
Washington may smack of the colonial-era
extra-territorial rights and could trigger an
angry backlash from both the government and people
of Pakistan.
The latter, in particular,
have long had a bone to pick against Washington on
the use of Shamsi by the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), which controls the unmanned drone
operations. More than a thousand people have been
killed in drone attacks that the people of
Pakistan see as the price being paid by them for
their government's collusion with Washington in a
war that they stubbornly refuse to embrace as
their own.
It seems, however, that the
power barons in Islamabad are themselves suffering
from a serious disconnect with each other in
sensitive decision-making. Information Minister
Firdous Ashiq Awan has feigned ignorance of any
decision to ask Washington to vacate Shamsi and
hinted that Mukhtar may possibly have expressed
his personal wish.
On the other hand, in
an exercise aimed, perhaps, at soothing some badly
frayed nerves in Islamabad, CIA sources in
Washington have revealed that Shamsi hasn't been
used to launch drone strikes inside Pakistan since
the Raymond Davis affair threw a spanner in the
works between the two countries. Davis, a
contractor with the CIA, was earlier this year
arrested and then set free after the killing of
two Pakistanis.
Drones, according to this
source, have since been launched from a base near
Jalalabad in Afghanistan. However, what matters to
the people of Pakistan - and rudely hurts them -
is the fact that they are still being hit, and
killed, irrespective of the provenance of these
flights.
A day before the Shamsi issue
became the latest casus belli between
Islamabad and Washington, the chief spokesman for
the Pakistan military's Inter-Services Public
Relations (ISPR) Directorate, Major General Athar
Abbas, issued a caustic statement in which he
cautioned US military commanders to be mindful of
Pakistan's "concerns and constraints".
Abbas was responding to remarks made a day
earlier in Washington by Lieutenant General John
Allen, nominated as successor to General David
Petraeus as commander of US and North Atlantic
Treaty Organization forces in Afghanistan, and
Admiral William McRaven, designated to lead the
Special Operations Command of US forces. Both were
testifying before the Armed Services Committee of
the US Senate.
in his testimony, Allen had
faulted Pakistan for "hedging" against a putative
US military withdrawal from Afghanistan by not
acting against the Haqqani group, long faulted by
the Americans as principal supporters of the
Taliban.
McRaven was even more acerbic in
castigating Pakistan for dragging its feet on the
long-insisted US demand that it conduct military
operations against the North Waziristan-based
Haqqani group. He described Pakistan's reluctance
as "both a capacity issue and potentially a
willingness issue" and added, to Pakistan's
chagrin: "I don't think it [the mindset] is likely
to change."
Abbas was clearly not amused
by these remarks. In military parlance, they
amounted to frontal attacks by top soldiers of
Pakistan's principal ally. He not only reminded
them to not lose sight of Pakistan's constraints
and concerns but also wryly added: "We reject the
allegations ... casting aspersions on the desire
and capability of Pakistan's army to fight
militancy."
It seems that the two sides
have, inadvertently, ventured into an apparently
snowballing series of tit-for-tat actions. The
same day that Abbas remonstrated in Islamabad
against Washington's unprovoked wrath against
Pakistan, President Barack Obama's chief security
adviser, John Brennan, told a meeting in
Washington that if other Osama-like targets were
identified in Pakistan, the US would not hesitate
to stage a re-run of the Osama raid.
It's
obvious that the Americans, buoyed by the success
of their stealth operation that took out Osama,
are anxious to press home their advantage. In
their rush to reap maximum benefit from the new
scenario, they feel with some justification that
the Pakistanis aren't as eager as they are, and
aren't willing to go that extra mile Washington
deems necessary to administer a long-sought coup
de grace against the terrorists holed up in
Pakistan's tribal belt. They seem determined to
mount as much pressure as they feel warranted for
bringing Pakistan into line.
However,
there's a danger that leaning too hard on Pakistan
may reap just the opposite effect.
Pakistan's military leadership has been
put on the defensive, vis-a-vis its own public
opinion, by the cumulative impact of the events of
the past two months. The military commanders have
been left in no doubt by a popular backlash that
faults them for being too in awe to the Americans
and complicit in a war that was unpopular from day
one and has become more so because of the blood
that drone attacks continue to spill.
Still, the ace up the sleeve for the
Pakistan military is the people's far greater
distrust of their political leadership than the
armed forces. Therefore, general headquarters
(GHQ) in Rawalpindi may see it as pragmatic to
stand up to the Americans and not sign on dotted
lines laid down by Washington, especially when the
weak and corruption-ridden civilian leadership of
Pakistan has absolutely no desire to cross swords
with the Americans.
Minister Mukhtar's
public demand on the Americans to vacate Shamsi
could have been prompted by a politician's gut
instinct not to be outwitted in the eyes of the
people by men in uniform.
Both the
Americans and the Pakistanis are walking a tight
rope and testing each other's wits. However, this
is a risky venture, to say the least, especially
when the stakes are so high. Any unraveling of
US-Pakistan ties could have a devastating impact
on Obama's plans to walk out of Afghanistan with
some face-saving.
In the latest
development, GHQ in Rawalpindi has announced the
launching of a "full-fledged [military] operation"
in central Kurram, close to the Tora Bora - where
al-Qaeda is said to have a strong presence - with
thousands of troops and helicopter gunships. The
area, according to military sources, had earlier
been declared as a conflict zone. Thousands of
civilians, according to a front page report in
daily Dawn, started fleeing as the military
offensive got under way.
The launching of
this latest offensive against militants well
inside Pakistan has only one interpretation: it is
an attempt by the Pakistan military to pull back
from the brink in its mangled relations with
Washington.
Karamtullah K Ghori
is a former Pakistani ambassador whose diplomatic
assignments took him to US, China, Japan, the
Philippines, Argentina, Algeria, Kuwait, Iraq,
Macedonia and Turkey. He may be reached at
K_K_ghori@yahoo.com
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