The US’s Af-Pak Policy: Fool Me Twice?
By Dr Mohammad Taqi
Florida
Just when everyone thought that Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Raheel Sharif had concluded his maiden visit to the US, he extended his stay. He topped this with a high profile meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry. In a tweet, Mr Kerry declared the meeting “productive” and lauded the Pakistan army’s role in fighting terrorism. Mr Kerry ostensibly also took upon himself to certify the military as a “truly binding force” in Pakistan.
The Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) chief splashed pictures of the Sharif-Kerry meeting on his Twitter feed. A conjoined Pakistan-US flags lapel pin was hard to miss on the dark suit that the COAS wore to the meeting instead of his usual military fatigues.
Whether the US and the Pakistani entourage had cleared such a meeting with the Pakistani civilian leadership is irrelevant. If there was any doubt that the military had pried away the national security and foreign policies from Prime Minister (PM) Mian Nawaz Sharif’s government, the imagery out of Washington DC removed it. This clearly would not be the first time that a US administration has undercut Pakistani civilian leadership quite so blatantly by going over its head to deal directly with the military. It happened during former COAS General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani’s era and obviously during General Pervez Musharraf’s dictatorship. The Pakistani military brass too has been seeking and getting direct access to US governments since the early 1950s. In his recent book, Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding, the former Pakistan ambassador, Professor Husain Haqqani, has noted that General Ayub Khan made a trip to the US in September 1953 before the planned visit of the Pakistani civilian leadership to that country. While his US hosts showed the General around the military facilities, he was not happy. Citing the US State Department’s former South Asia expert Dennis Kux, Professor Haqqani notes that miffed at not getting the aid pledge he desired, General Ayub Khan barged into the office of Assistant Secretary of State Henry Byroade and said,” For Christ’s sake, I did not come here to look at barracks. Our army can be your army if you want us. But let us make a decision.”
Dennis Kux further notes that “Official Washington, whether Congress, the Pentagon, the CIA, or the State Department, liked Ayub. His handsome and imposing physical presence and clipped Sandhurst manners conveyed the impression that in signing up Pakistan, the US would be enlisting the successor to the British Indian army” against the Soviet Union. General Ayub Khan ended up meeting Secretary of State John Foster Dulles on September 30,1953, who personally assured him of military assistance. Over the next several years the US pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the Pakistani military establishment, provided hardware and trained its officers corps, all of which helped that outfit mount the 1965 misadventure against India.
Not much seems to have changed since General Ayub Khan’s visit. Sections of the security establishment create artificial political crises like Imran Khan and Dr Tahirul Qadri’s dharna (sit-in) protests only to project and position the military as the pre-eminent force that can arbitrate between squabbling politicians. Between the protests and Operation Zarb-e-Azb in North Waziristan, the military establishment has come out smelling like roses to the US it seems. The Generals are saying to the US what the latter want to hear and are getting rewarded for it. Like the US diplomats stationed in Pakistan in the 1950s, their successors today also seem to be contributing favorably to the Pakistani establishment’s image building exercise without ever asking any hard questions.
The establishment’s current pitch remains that it has gone after both good and bad jihadists in the recent operations and is sincerely suing for peace in Afghanistan. Tall claims notwithstanding, Pakistan has failed to show that it has captured or killed a single Haqqani terrorist network commander or a member of Mullah Omar’s Quetta Shura. In fact the Taliban have launched at least 10 major attacks inside Afghanistan, including the massacre at the volleyball game in Paktika and an assault into Camp Bastion, Helmand, since General Sharif landed in the US. The Afghans would be justified in asking ISAF/US Lieutenant General Joseph Anderson that if Pakistan has acted decisively against the terrorist sanctuaries on its soil as he has vouched, where exactly are these sophisticated attacks being coordinated and launched from? Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai was not that off the mark when he recently criticized US policy saying that the US “has been both encouraging the thief to steal and the house owner to safeguard his house”. The Taliban’s brazen attacks indicate both their ability to strike and to actually do so to strengthen the Pakistani hand in negotiations. While the Afghan security forces fought back valiantly, current Afghan President Ashraf Ghani was forced to warn, without naming Pakistan, that the state sponsorship of non-state actors could have “blowback effects”.
Mr Kerry and the State Department can believe what they want but there is not a smidgeon of change in the Pakistani security establishment’s domestic or regional policies. India-oriented jihadists like Hafiz Saeed, widely blamed for the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks and wanted by the US, are living large in Pakistan. Reportedly, the Pakistan government is running two special trains to transport people to Lahore for Saeed’s outfit, the Jamat-ud-Dawa’s two-day convention starting today. Sections of the establishment continue to give a lease of life to Imran Khan’s farcical protests in an effort to upend the current democratic dispensation. Even if that fails, the establishment through this protests charade has successfully clipped PM Nawaz Sharif’s foreign policy wings. He was punished for his peace and trade overtures to India. The current top brass is no less averse to peace with India than the self-avowed “India-centric” General Kayani was. And meddling in Afghanistan remains directly connected to the Pakistani establishment’s perennial phobia of Indian hegemony, which is unlikely to change when the US continues to look the other way.
The US tried outsourcing its Afghan policy to the Pakistani establishment in the 1990s with disastrous consequences. More recently, the Musharraf-Kayani duo pulled the wool over US eyes and inflicted great agony on the Afghans. As Mr Kerry heads to the London Conference on Afghanistan that starts today, he may wish to recall the Americanism: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
(The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com and he tweets @mazda)
