Pakistan:
The Punching Bag
By Mohammad Ashraf
Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
There is a season of picking
on Pakistan these days. Friends or foes, all are
lined up to have their share of the flesh. In
fact, mouthful bites are coming from those who
have benefited from it most. Mark Twain once said,
“It takes an enemy and a friend working
together to hurt you in the heart; the one to
slander you, and the other to get the news to
you”.
Is Pakistan running out of luck? Is President
Musharraf passing through the last phase of his
rule like the Shah of Iran in1979? The doomsayers
and lovers of “democracy” are predicting
so. Pakistan’s success, meager or substantial,
hardly ever appears sitting well with them. American
media, India, and Afghanistan, all are in competition,
orchestrating in a unified voice one message -
“on its fight against terrorism, Pakistan
needs to do more, and not employ militant Jihadi
proxies to pursue its foreign policy goals”.
Husain Haqqani, one time partner of Mian Nawaz
Sharif and Benazir’s establishment (both
in essence resembled more to a Military regime
than to a democracy), in his book: Pakistan; between
Mosque and Military, joins the trio and holds
that Pakistan is a double-crosser. The little
yeast has bitterly turned the whole dough sour.
Pakistan, presently a victim of cross-border terrorism
itself, is being painted as the very father of
it.
If a needle gets lost in a haystack, it can possibly
be retrieved in three ways. One by combing the
haystack straw by straw, a tiresome and time-consuming
job promising little success at the end; second,
by putting the whole barn on fire, burning it
and everything that surrounds it, hoping to find
the needle sticking out neat and clean in the
heap of ashes; and the last, sucking it out through
powerful, modern electro-magnetic devices, without
causing any collateral damage, a new phrase for
innocent killings.
That needle, the Al-Queda terrorists, a bunch
of nomadic loonies who could have been sucked
out, interrogated and brought to justice, had
the United States with its most advanced means
and methods, followed the third method. In anger
and arrogance - (Arkansas senator, Fulbright once
had asked, “Can America overcome the fatal
arrogance of power?) - it chose to adopt the way
which most in similar positions often have followed
in history, the second way: burning the whole
village that fires a shot. Pakistan also did the
same in 1971 in East Pakistan. The needle is yet
to be recovered, (Osama bin Laden, the main culprit
and Mulla Omar, the one who harbored him, are
still at large) while all those who happened to
be in and around the barn got burnt out.
Pakistan is one such unfortunate neighbor. Those
who always traded in drugs and sat in the lap
of the communists, sheltered terrorists and criminals
for ransom and made the life of their own poor
people a living hell, feel now emboldened enough
to tell the American President, “It is Pakistan,
Sir”. Summing up the fruits of the American
President’s visit to Afghanistan, India
and Pakistan, one rustic Lahorite in his homespun
humor said, “Mauja India noo; Kachra safai
sanoo”, “ A sumptuous feast of favors
to India; cleaning up of the mess to Pakistan”.
As far back as May, 1996 Robin Raphel, the US
Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia and
a key policy maker for Afghanistan, had told the
US Senate in no uncertain terms, “Afghanistan
has become a conduit for drugs, crime and terrorism
that can undermine Pakistan, the neighboring Central
Asian states and have an impact beyond Europe
and Russia”. She also had rightly hinted
that extremist training camps in Afghanistan were
exporting terrorism. Her warnings were never underpinned,
nor were they taken seriously, reports Ahmad Rashid
in his book, Taliban. The American invasion of
Afghanistan in October, 2001, just spilled the
beans towards Pakistan. The present turmoil in
North and South Waziristan, Miranshah and in the
entire tribal belt is the direct result of it.
From Kohat to Quetta on the Pakistani border side,
and from Kabul to Kandahar on the Afghanistan
border side, there are a whole lot of heavily
armed tribal people who are up in arms against
Pakistan for being an ally of America, and are
against Karzai for a similar reason. Any one of
them would have traded Osama bin Laden for a price,
certainly much less than 250 billion dollars spent
so far, after the tragedy of 9/11, had America
not oriented its entire fight against terrorism
to the capturing or killing of Osama alone. Not
even 1% in Pakistan knew who this creature was.
America made him a super hero. Indiscreet killings
have given birth to a rich crop of sympathizers.
Fareed Zakaria in his article, “Separating
Fact from Fantasy”, (Newsweek, March 13,
2006) rightly puts his finger on the core of the
problem in Iraq, and by extension on Afghanistan.
“Current events are the product of recent
forces, some set in motion by Saddam Hussain,
others by the American occupation. Perhaps they
can be reversed even at this stage, but it will
take a more full-scale and aggressive reversal
of American policy…hindsight may not be
the only wisdom, but it’s better than operating
in the dark”.
One is reminded of the saying of the 29th President
of America, Warren Harding (1865-1923) who observed
after the First World War, “America’s
present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums
but normalcy; not revolution but restoration,
not surgery but serenity; not the dramatic but
the dispassionate; not experiment but equipoise;
not submergence in internationality but sustainment
in triumphant nationality”. The right thing,
the fight against terrorism, has been done so
awkwardly that the most beloved name of America
has become synonymous with imperialism, now.
Osama and Mulla Oma,r if arrested or killed, will
not initiate the flowing of honey and milk rivulets
in the area; as there has cropped up a whole world
of sympathizers, said President Musharraf. They
are not lovers of Osama bin Laden ; they are mourners
of their dead ones. The problem of rooting out
terrorism has become complex due to the mistakes
made in this direction.
Robert Pape, a political scientist who studied
suicide terrorism from 1980 to 2001 points out,
“ Religion is not the force behind suicide
terrorism… the data shows that there is
little connection between suicide terrorism and
Islamic fundamentalism, or any religion for that
matter. From Lebanon to Israel to Sri Lanka to
Kashmir to Chechnya, the objective behind terrorism
has been to establish or maintain political self-determination.
According to him religion is rarely the root cause,
although it is used as a tool in recruiting and
can be employed to serve the broader strategic
objective. Dubbing Islam as the perpetrator of
terrorism has been the biggest diverting and distracting
factor in the fight against terrorism. Terrorism
in any form and manifestation is a scourge, and
needs to be eradicated with the fullest sense
of sincerity. India found a God-sent opportunity
in the war against terrorism to shelve the Kashmir
issue by putting the entire blame of the indigenous
insurgency on Pakistan. Pakistan had not been
totally innocent in this matter. But then President
Musharraf made two very bold U-turns with regard
to the Afghanistan and Kashmir policy. India fished
handsomely in America’s war on terrorism.
The Economist is right when it says on the Kashmir
solution, “India plays for time, adventurous
Pakistan diplomacy tries to force a result”
And events like the mistreatment of prisoners
at Abu Ghraib and Guatanamo Bay; desecration of
the Qur’an and the publication of the caricaturing
cartoons of Prophet Muhammad all combined have
destroyed by miles what was achieved in inches
in the direction of ridding the world of terrorism
and promoting goodwill and peace in it. Disgruntled
elements like the Taliban, politicians out of
power, and religious leaders starved of funds,
all are busy in cashing upon any issue that falls
in their way; be it as benign as the construction
of dams, as humane as the rehabilitation of the
earthquake victims; as dear as the sanctity of
the name of Prophet Muhammad; as mundane as the
shortage of sugar; as grave as the presence of
militants on the border, all are used for two
clearly defined objectives: build-on the hatred
of America and dislodging of Musharraf. President
Musharraf can be criticized for donning the uniform,
and yet insisting that Pakistan is heading towards
a sustainable democracy, but he cannot be blamed
for double-crossing anybody on the issue of war
against terrorism. In the words of Ayaz Amir,
he, in fact, ran faster than America in this fight.
40% Taliban of the 20 million Afghan population
are Pashtuns, and 17% of the Pakistan army consists
of Pashtuns. Like the Mexicans, living in California
or in Mexico, the Pushtuns on both sides of the
border are inextricably intertwined with each
other. America with all its advanced technologies
has not been able to stop the traffic of illegal
migrants across a flat border; how can Pakistan
be expected to stonewall completely the ins and
outs of the Pushtuns who share all the tribal
values on a border which is declared as one of
the toughest in the world.
In a new book, ‘I is for Infidel: From Holy
War to Holy Terror”, Kathy Gannon, looks
at the Afghan problem from the point of view of
the natives, and not through the eyes of the Westerns.
She counts some of the Afghan prejudices: Afghans
have a deep suspicion of the motives that underpin
Western involvement in the region; they are dismayed
at the continued influence of Afghan political
elites with blood on their hands; and they have
a conviction that most of the country’s
woes are the fault of the more powerful nations
that surround it. The point she misses is that
Afghans like most Muslims are the least self-analytical.
If capturing Osama were the beginning and end
of all war against terrorism then there was a
time when the Taliban had offered to hand over
Bin Laden to the CIA, and Ms. Gannon calls this
a lost opportunity. The second time America had
Osama in their crosshairs was at Tora Bora, the
honeycomb of caves, but it let him slip because
America showed “reluctance to pitch ground-troops
into the fight”, grumbles CIA’s key
field commander, Mr.Gary Bernsten in his book,
“Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and
Al Queda”. It was Taliban’s isolation
that linked them with the pan-Islamic terrorists
of Al-Queda. Ms. Gannon rightfully debunks the
theory that members of the Northern Alliance,
the allies to the US-led coalition in 2001, “were
Afghanistan’s good guys” Taliban owed
their birth to them as they fought incessantly
for money and drugs; Taliban’s introduction
to Osama bin Laden and his escape at Tora Bora
was due to one of them, namely Abdul Rasul Sayyif,
who now sits in the Afghanistan parliament. These
“good guys”, are a major part of the
problem, and not a solution to the turmoil in
Afghanistan. Their hatred of Pakistan passes through
partly what Taliban had done to them, and partly
due to their historical proximity to the Indians.
In the reconstruction of Afghanistan, while all
the contracts invariably have gone to the Indians,
Pakistan is just expected to keep running the
supply of sugar, meat, flour and a free passage
to their contraband items, which soon find their
presence in the illegal markets in Pakistan.
If the butcher of the Balkans, Mr. Slobodan Milosevic
could be brought to the court to face the war
crimes tribunal in The Hague, why could these
war lords be an exception? In the words of Andrew
North of the BBC, “It is four years since
the fall of the Taleban regime. The United States
has spent billions of dollars on its operations
in Afghanistan, but what does it have to show
for it?” Insecurity and insurgency rule
the country. Why would Pakistan, an ally in this
battle play the role of a double agent? It is,
in fact, the large-heartedness of Pakistan, that
it still is on board with President Karzai, notwithstanding
the fact that he has taken under the fold of his
“shoulder-choga”, the sworn enemies
of Pakistan; the people who actually perpetrated
atrocities on the Afghan people and forced more
than 3 million of them to flee their homeland
and live as refugees in Pakistan. Pakistan just
helped the Taliban with the United States consent,
just to have peace and stability in its neighborhood.
The recognition of Taliban regime by Pakistan
and Saudi Arabia was also with the United States’
fullest consent. Was it not at one time that America
itself was close to recognizing them?
In the words of Ahmed Rashid, “The US rejection
of the Taliban was largely because of the pressure
exerted by the feminist movement at home…from
supporting the Taliban the USA had now moved to
the other extreme of rejecting them completely”.
Once the US- produced alphabet book for schools
in refugee camps along the Afghan border taught,
“J is for Jihad, K is for Kalashnikov and
I is for Infidel”. Pakistan in particular
and the world at large, as victims of this Jihadi
terrorism, are just trying to make them unlearn
what they have learnt over a period of many years,
rather too well.
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