DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The alliance from
hell By Dilip Hiro
The
United States and Pakistan are by now a classic
example of a dysfunctional nuclear family (with an
emphasis on "nuclear"). While the two governments
and their peoples become more suspicious and
resentful of each other with every passing month,
Washington and Islamabad are still locked in an
awkward post-9/11 embrace that, at this juncture,
neither can afford to let go of.
Washington is keeping Pakistan, with its
collapsing economy and bloated military, afloat
but also cripplingly dependent on its handouts and
US-sanctioned International Monetary Fund loans.
Meanwhile, CIA drones unilaterally strike its
tribal borderlands. Islamabad returns the favor.
It holds Washington hostage over its Afghan War
from which the Pentagon won't be able to exit in an
orderly fashion without
its help. By blocking US and NATO supply routes
into Afghanistan (after a US cross-border air
strike had killed 24 Pakistani soldiers) from
November 2011 until last July, Islamabad managed
to ratchet up the cost of the war while
underscoring its indispensability to the Obama
administration.
At the heart of this
acerbic relationship, however, is Pakistan's
arsenal of 110 nuclear bombs which, if the country
were to disintegrate, could fall into the hands of
Islamist militants, possibly from inside its own
security establishment. As Barack Obama confided
to his aides, this remains his worst
foreign-policy nightmare, despite the decision of
the US Army to train a commando unit to retrieve
Pakistan's nukes, should extremists seize some of
them or materials to produce a "dirty bomb"
themselves.
Two publics, differing
opinions Pakistan's military high command
fears the Pentagon's contingency plans to seize
its nukes. Following the clandestine strike by US
SEALs that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in
May 2011, it loaded elements of its nuclear
arsenal onto trucks, which rumbled around the
country to frustrate any possible American attempt
to grab its most prized possessions. When Senator
John Kerry arrived in Islamabad to calm frayed
nerves following Bin Laden's assassination, high
Pakistani officials insisted on a written US
promise not to raid their nuclear arsenal. He
snubbed the demand.
Since then mutual
distrust between the two nominal allies - a
relationship encapsulated by some in the term
"AmPak" - has only intensified. Last month, for
instance, Pakistan became the sole Muslim country
to officially call on the Obama administration to
ban the anti-Islamic 14-minute video clip
Innocence of Muslims, which depicts the Prophet
Muhammad as a womanizer, religious fraud, and
pedophile.
While offering a bounty of
US$100,000 for the killing of Nakoula Basseley
Nakoula, an Egyptian-American Christian producer
of the movie, Pakistan's Railways Minister Ghulam
Ahmad Bilour called on al-Qaeda and the Pakistani
Taliban to be "partners in this noble deed". Prime
Minister Raja Ashraf distanced his government from
Bilour's incitement to murder, a criminal offense
under Pakistani law, but did not dismiss him from
the cabinet. The US State Department strongly
condemned Bilour's move.
Pakistan also
stood out as the only Muslim state whose
government declared a public holiday, "Love the
Prophet Muhammad Day", to encourage its people to
demonstrate against the offending movie. The US
Embassy's strategy of disarming criticism with TV
and newspaper ads showing President Obama and
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemning "the
content and the message" of the film failed to
discourage protesters. In fact, the demonstrations
in major Pakistani cities turned so violent that
23 protesters were killed, the highest figure
worldwide.
Taking advantage of the
government's stance, proscribed jihadist
organizations made a defiant show of their
continued existence. In Lahore, the capital of
Punjab, the country's largest province, activists
from the banned Lashkar-e Taiba (Army of the
Pure), whose leader Hafiz Saeed is the target of a
$10 million bounty by Washington, led protesters
toward the American consulate where perimeter
defenses had been breached earlier in the week. In
Islamabad, activists from the Sipah-e-Sahaba
(Soldiers of the Prophet's Companions), an
outlawed Sunni faction, clashed with the police
for hours in the course of a march to the heavily
guarded diplomatic enclave.
These outlawed
organizations continue to operate with impunity in
an environment that has grown rabidly
anti-American. A June 2012 survey by the
Washington-based Pew Research Center (PRC) found
that 74% of Pakistanis consider the United States
an enemy. By contrast, only 12% believe that US
aid helps solve problems in their country in a
situation in which 89% describe their nation's
economic situation as "bad".
The American
public's view of Pakistan is equally bleak.
February polls by Gallup and Fox News indicated
that 81% of Americans had an unfavorable view of
that country; just 15% held a contrary view, the
lowest figure of the post-9/11 period (with only
the remaining "axis of evil" states of Iran and
North Korea faring worse).
Clashing
views on the war on terror Most Americans
consider Pakistan an especially unreliable ally in
Washington's war on terror. That it provided safe
haven to bin Laden for 10 years before his violent
death in 2011 reinforced this perception. Bin
Laden's successor, Ayman Zawahiri, is widely
believed to be hiding in Pakistan. So, too, are
Mullah Muhammad Omar and other leaders of the
Afghan Taliban.
It beggars belief that
this array of Washington's enemies can continue to
function inside the country without the knowledge
of its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence
directorate (ISI) which reputedly has nearly
100,000 employees and informers. Even if serving
ISI officers are not in cahoots with the Afghan
Taliban, many retired ISI officers clearly are.
The rationale for this, top Pakistani
officials say privately, is that the Afghan
Taliban and the allied Haqqani Network are not
attacking targets in Pakistan and so pose no
threat to the state. In practice, these
political-military entities are being sustained by
Islamabad as future surrogates in a post-American
Afghanistan. Their task is to ensure a
pro-Islamabad government in Kabul, immune to
offers of large-scale economic aid from India, the
regional superpower. In short, it all boils down
to Washington and Islamabad pursuing clashing aims
in war-ravaged Afghanistan and in Pakistan as
well.
The Pakistani government's
multifaceted stance toward Washington has wide
public support. Popular hostility toward the US
stems from several interrelated factors. Above
all, most Pakistanis view the war on terror from a
radically differently perspective than Americans.
Since its primary targets have been the
predominantly Muslim countries of Afghanistan and
Iraq, they equate it with an American crusade
against Islam.
While US pundits and
politicians invariably cite the $24 billion in
assistance and military aid Washington has given
Islamabad in the post-9/11 period, Pakistanis
stress the heavy price they have paid for
participating in the Washington-led war. "No
country and no people have suffered more in the
epic struggle against terrorism than Pakistan,"
said President Asif Ali Zardari at the United
Nations General Assembly last month.
His
government argues that, as a result of joining the
war on terror, Pakistan has suffered a loss of $68
billion over the past decade. A widely
disseminated statistic at home, it includes
estimated losses due to a decline in foreign
investments and adverse effects on trade, tourism,
and businesses. Islamabad attributes all this to
the insecurity caused by the terrorist acts of
local jihadists in response to its participation
in Washington's war. Then there are the roughly
4,000 Pakistani military fatalities suffered
during post-9/11 operations against terror groups
and other homegrown militants - significantly
higher than all allied troops killed in
Afghanistan. Some 35,000 civilians have also died
or suffered injuries in the process.
Drones fuel popular rage During
a September address to the Asia Society in New
York, Foreign Minister Hinna Rabbani Khar was
asked for an explanation of the rampant
anti-American sentiment in her country. She
replied with a single word: "drones". At any given
time, CIA drones, buzzing like wasps and armed
with Hellfire missiles, circle round the clock
over an area in Pakistan's tribal zone, their
high-resolution cameras recording movements below.
This fills people on the ground with unending
terror, being unable to guess when and where the
missiles will be fired.
A June Pew
Research Center survey shows that 97% of
Pakistanis familiar with the drone attacks held a
negative view of them. "Those who are familiar
with the drone campaign also overwhelmingly (94%)
believe the attacks kill too many innocent
people," states its report. "Nearly three-quarters
(74%) say they are not necessary to defend
Pakistan from extremist organizations." (In stark
contrast, a February Washington Post-ABC News poll
found that 83% of Americans - and 73% of liberal
Democrats - support Obama's drone onslaught.)
A recent anti-drone "march" by a nine-mile
long motorcade from Islamabad to the border of the
South Waziristan tribal agency was led by Imran
Khan, head of the Movement for Justice political
party. Joined by protesters from the US and
Britain, it was a dramatic reminder of the depth
of popular feeling against the drones. By
refraining from forcibly entering South Waziristan
in defiance of an official ban, Khan stayed within
the law. And by so doing, he enhanced his already
impressive 70% approval rating and improved the
chances of his party - committed to ending
Islamabad's participation in Washington's war on
terror - to achieve a breakthrough in the upcoming
parliamentary election.
Unlike in Yemen,
where the government has authorized the Obama
administration to stage drone attacks, Pakistani
leaders, who implicitly accepted such strikes
before the Pentagon's gross violation of their
country's sovereignty in the bin Laden killing, no
longer do so. "The use of unilateral strikes on
Pakistan territory is illegal," said Foreign
Minister Khar. Her government, she explained,
needed to rally popular backing for its campaign
to quash armed militant groups, and the drones
make that impossible. "As the drones fly over the
territory of Pakistan, it becomes an American war
and the whole logic of this being our fight, in
our own interest, is immediately put aside and
again it is a war imposed on us."
Underlying the deployment of a drone,
helicopter, or jet fighter to hit a target in a
foreign country is an updated version of the
Vietnam-era doctrine of "hot pursuit", which
ignores the basic concept of national sovereignty.
Pakistani leaders fear that if they do not protest
Washington's continued use of drones for "targeted
killings" of Pakistan-based individuals selected
in the White House, their arch-rival India will
follow suit. It will hit the camps in Pakistan
allegedly training terrorists to destabilize
Indian Kashmir. That is one of the ongoing
nightmares of Pakistan's senior generals.
The nuclear conundrum Since
India would be the prime target of any
nuclear-armed extremists, the Indian government
dreads the prospect of Pakistan's nukes falling
into such hands far more than President Obama. The
alarm of both Delhi and Washington is well
justified, particularly because Pakistan's arsenal
is growing faster than any on Earth - and the
latest versions of nukes it's producing are
smaller and so easier to hijack.
Over the
past five years, Pakistani extremists have staged
a series of attacks on sensitive military
installations, including nuclear facilities. In
November 2007, for example, they attacked Sargodha
airbase where nuclear-capable F-16 jet aircraft
are stationed. The following month a suicide
bomber targeted a Pakistani Air Force base
believed to hold nuclear weapons at Kamra, 37
miles northwest of Islamabad. In August 2008, a
group of suicide bombers blew up the gates to a
weapons complex at the Wah cantonment containing a
nuclear warhead assembly plant, leaving 63 people
dead. A further assault on Kamra took place in
October 2009 and yet another last August, this
time by eight suicide bombers belonging to the
Pakistani Taliban.
Given Pakistan's
dependence on a continuing supply of US-made
advanced weaponry - essential to withstand any
onslaught by India in a conventional war - its
government has had to continually reassure
Washington that the security of its nuclear
arsenal is foolproof. Its leaders have repeatedly
assured their American counterparts that the
hemispheres containing nuclear fuel and the
triggers for activating the weapons are stored
separately under tight guard. This has failed to
allay the anxieties of successive American
presidents. What disconcerts the US is that,
despite contributing hundreds of millions of
dollars to underwrite programs to help Pakistan
secure its nuclear arms, it does not know where
many of these parts are stored.
This is
not going to change. The military planners in
Islamabad correctly surmise that Delhi and
Washington would like to turn Pakistan into a
non-nuclear power. At present, they see their
nuclear arsenal as the only effective deterrent
they have against an Indian aggression which, in
their view, they experienced in 1965. "We
developed all these nukes to use against India,"
said an unnamed senior Pakistani military officer
recently quoted in the London-based Sunday Times
Magazine. "Now they turn out to be very useful in
dealing with the US."
In short, Pakistan's
military high command has come to view its nuclear
arsenal as an effective deterrent not only against
its traditional adversary, India, but also its
nominal ally in Washington. If such thinking
solidifies as the country's military doctrine in
the years following the Pentagon's withdrawal from
Afghanistan, then Pakistan may finally find itself
removed from Washington's list of non-NATO allies,
ending the dysfunctional nuclear family of
international politics. What that would mean in
global terms is anyone's guess.
Dilip Hiro, a TomDispatch
regular, is the author of 33 books, the most
recent being Apocalyptic Realm: Jihadists in
South Asia (Yale University Press, New Haven
and London).
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