 Enemy within: Pakistani army has launched an offensive against Islamist Taliban in the country's South Waziristan region.
This article, by South Asia’s most knowledgeable author on the Islamist
upsurge in Pakistan and Afghanistan, originally appeared in YaleGlobal,
the flagship publication of the Yale University Center for the Study of
Globalization. Reprinted with permission.
After nine suicide attacks in just eleven days that killed 150 people,
including many from the security forces, the Pakistan army has finally
started its long-awaited offensive in South Waziristan where the
Pakistani Taliban are based.
The success of the offensive,
against the backdrop of a serious civil-military division in Pakistan
and unresolved debate in Washington, could be critical for the fate of
Pakistan, which is financially broke and politically paralyzed.
The
army and the civilian government are once more at odds over policy
towards the US and India, the insurgency in Baluchistan, and how to
deal with militant Punjabi groups who are linked to the Taliban.
Moreover, still unresolved and now an issue of growing international
concern, is the sanctuary being given to Afghan Taliban in Pakistan.
Dozens
of soldiers and police officers have been killed in suicide attacks
from October 5 to 15 that included an embarrassing 22 hour siege of the
army headquarters in Rawalpindi and the deaths of eight soldiers and
three simultaneous attacks on police training camps and intelligence
offices in Lahore. The spate of attacks could have been designed to
prevent or delay the expected army offensive on its stronghold, but
they also aimed to topple the government, impose an Islamic state, and,
if possible, get hold of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.
The recent
attacks have proved more deadly than those in the past because they
took place in three of the country’s four provinces, involving not just
Taliban tribesmen from the Pashtun ethnic group, but extremist Punjabi
and Kashmiri factions who were until recently trained by the
Interservices Intelligence (ISI) to fight Indian forces in Indian
Kashmir.
Moreover, several within the militant leadership had
direct connections to the army or the ISI. The so called Dr Usman, the
leader of the nine man group that attacked the army’s general
headquarters on October 10, was himself a member of the army’s medical
corps. Police officials say that the Rawalpindi and Lahore attacks had
help from inside because the terrorists were able to bypass the
stringent security measures in place and had knowledge of the layout of
the complexes.
While the armed forces are unwilling to admit
what many Pakistanis now believe – that there is some degree of
penetration by extremist sympathizers within its ranks – the civilian
government refuses to admit that the largest province of Punjab and
especially its poverty-hit southern part has become the major new
recruiting ground for militants.
The Punjab provincial
government is run by Shabaz Sharif, the brother of Nawaz Sharif and
leader of the opposition in the country. The Sharif brothers who ruled
the country twice in the 1990s are known to have close ties with the
leaders of several militant groups, including Hafez Saeed, the leader
of the Lashkar-e-Taiba whose militants carried out the massacre in
Mumbai India last year.
Saeed, wanted by India and Interpol has
been freed twice from jail in Punjab, on account of lack of evidence to
hold him. The Sharifs have refused repeated requests by the Americans,
British, Indians and the federal government to crack down on militancy
in south Punjab where it is strong and providing recruits for the
Taliban.
Meanwhile the federal government has suffered
increasingly fraught relations with the army. Last week at the height
of the suicide attacks, the army chief General Ashfaq Pervaiz Kayani
chose that moment to blast the civilian government for agreeing to a US
$ 7.5 billion five-year aid package from the US for civilian and
developmental purposes.
The army was furious that the government
had agreed to US imposed conditions, which only insisted that there be
civilian control of the army, democracy be maintained and the fight
against extremism continued. The army with its deep tentacles in the
Pakistani media and among opposition politicians, whipped up a storm of
public opinion against the deal, with some commentators accusing the
government of President Asif Ali Zardari of treason.
Neither the
army nor the politicians seemed to notice that the country is nearly
bankrupt, barely subsisting on life support loans from the
International Monetary Fund worth a total of US$11.3 billion. Pakistan
has been holding out a begging bowl for the past year, while factories,
farms and schools are shutting down because of a chronic shortage of
electric power, which is off in major cities for up to 10 hours a day.
The
civilian government has also tried repeatedly to end the long running
separatist insurgency in Baluchistan province by declaring ceasefires
and the promise to hold talks with insurgent leaders. However Baluch
leaders accuse the army of sabotaging any such political reconciliation
by continuing to assassinate or carry out forced disappearances of
Baluch activists.
Meanwhile as the policy review over
Afghanistan and Pakistan continues in the White House, both the army
and government are being directly accused by US officials of continuing
to harbor the Afghan Taliban leadership and allowing them to pump in
recruits, logistics and other supplies into Afghanistan.
As
long as only British and Canadian troops in Helmand and Kandahar faced
the effects of the Taliban’s safe sanctuaries in Pakistan’s Baluchistan
province, the former Bush administration was quiet. But now that there
are over 10,000 US marines in Helmand and Kandahar who are taking
casualties, the Obama administration has made the sanctuary issue a
major plank in its future relations with Pakistan.
But the
dithering in Washington over the future of US policy towards
Afghanistan is leading to greater justification by Pakistan and other
neighbors of Afghanistan to hedge their bets for the future in case the
Americans withdraw or reduce their commitment, by backing once again
their favorite Afghan proxies just as they did during the 1990s civil
war.
Pakistan has been saving the Afghan Taliban leadership for
just such an eventuality. But now Iran, Russia, India and the Central
Asian states are all looking at their future in the country in the
light of a US lack of resolve to stay the course in Afghanistan. US
relations with Pakistan’s military remain troubled – everyone knows
that it is still the army and not the civilian government that calls
the shots when it comes to policy towards India and Afghanistan.
However
it is the worsening relations between the civilians and the military
over domestic issues that are causing growing consternation at home. It
is unlikely that General Kayani would like to overthrow the civilian
government, but the army is resisting any attempt by the civilians to
change the broad ambit of foreign or domestic policy.
Zardari is
known to want peace and trade with India, an end to interference in
Afghanistan, improved ties with Iran and better relations and more aid
from the West to strengthen the economy and democracy.
However,
Zardari’s attempts to build up public support for these logical civil
demands have been stymied because of public disillusionment with the
civilian government, which is considered to be corrupt, ineffective,
incompetent and unwilling to rebuild moribund institutions of
governance.
The key to future stability is to bring the army,
civilian government and the opposition onto one page with a common
agenda to fight extremism, while amicably resolving other internal
disputes, but so far that looks extremely unlikely.
Ahmed Rashid is the author, most recently of "Descent into Chaos: The
US and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia."
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