Business as Usual
By Dr Mohammad Taqi
Florida

Yet another suicide bombing rocked Kabul earlier last week. The target apparently was a US-led coalition’s military convoy. According to the Afghan ministry of interior spokesman, one civilian was killed and 22 were injured in the attack. The Afghan Taliban swiftly claimed responsibility for the assault.

After the attack on the Afghan parliament, Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS) officials squarely blamed elements within Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) for orchestrating the attack through the Haqqani terrorist network. Pakistan has formally denied the Afghan allegations but that did not prevent Afghan Interior Minister Noor-ul-Haq Olomi from postponing his official visit to Pakistan. The much-trumpeted memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed between the NDS and the ISI seems to have been reduced to a memorandum of massive misunderstanding. The stillborn MoU was not expected to deliver anything meaningful as the substantive changes needed and pledged on the part of Pakistan were missing. Afghan President Dr Ashraf Ghani was duly chastised by his own parliament for approving that MoU. The ferocity and number of Taliban attacks in recent weeks have vindicated Dr Ashraf Ghani’s detractors, putting a huge question mark on Pakistan’s capacity and will to rein in the Afghan Taliban.

The official narrative out of Pakistan has maintained that since the change of guard in Rawalpindi, the distinction between the so-called ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Taliban has been ditched and the Zarb-e-Azb military operation in North Waziristan has targeted both varieties of jihadists. While the bad jihadists of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) seem to have indeed been hit hard, the Afghanistan-oriented jihadists like the Afghan Taliban affiliate Haqqani terrorist network seem to have been painstakingly relocated to other safe havens straddling the Durand Line. Mullah Omar’s Quetta Shura and its fraternal Peshawar Shura’s Afghan Taliban were outside the ambit of the Zarb-e-Azb Operation to begin with. The Taliban surge since the start of their so-called spring offensive on April 24 indicates that their leadership, logistics and firepower remained unscathed in Zarb-e-Azb’s operations. Taliban representatives have, no doubt, shown up for talks in Qatar and Oslo, perhaps at Pakistan’s prodding, but only to cement politically the gains they are making in the battlefield. It is simply not possible, however, for the Taliban to carry out a diversified, multi-front offensive from Kunduz in the Afghan north to Helmand in the south without their core leadership intact and safe.

Some analysts who echo the Pakistani security establishment’s view would have one believe that despite trying hard Pakistan is unable to usher the Taliban to the negotiating table. They maintain that Taliban field commanders are simply not under Pakistani control while the upper echelons are too headstrong to heed ‘sane counsel’. We heard the exact same excuses in the 1980s when Pakistan was backing mujahideen jihadists against the People’s Democratic Party (PDPA) government and did not want them to accept the PDPA’s broad-based government proposal. The Afghan jihadists survive and thrive thanks to patronage — money, training, logistics and even passports — just as they did in the 1980s. The Pakistani officials who reportedly asked the Afghan government to issue hundreds of passports to the Taliban would surely know their whereabouts too.

The Taliban do not necessarily have to be bombed to push them to talks when denying them sanctuary might just do the trick. It is pertinent to recall that flat denials were issued for a decade on how the Jalaluddin Haqqani network’s leadership was not based in Pakistan before the terror group’s key financier, Nasiruddin Haqqani, was assassinated in 2013 on the outskirts of Islamabad no less. And it was not that the Haqqanis were simply lying low. According to recently released WikiLeaks cables, Nasiruddin had ostensibly met the Saudi ambassador to Pakistan and his father (and the network founder), Jalaluddin, apparently carried a Saudi passport. The way the Haqqanis have been preserved yet again indicates that it is the will of the Pakistani security establishment to settle the Afghan imbroglio peacefully, not its capacity, that is dubious.

Developments inside Pakistan in tandem with a duplicitous Afghan policy suggest that even under the new stewardship little has actually changed. From behind the façade of a faux Baloch nationalist government, brute force has been unleashed against the Baloch insurgents. On Tuesday, a ruthless operation was conducted in Mashkay in the Awaran region in which at least 14 people were killed, including Safar Khan and Suleiman ‘Shahek’ Baloch, who were the brother and nephew, respectively, of the guerrilla leader Dr Allah Nazar Baloch. Several of those killed were said to be noncombatants.

Alongside indiscriminate bombardment, a buying off spree is underway in Balochistan to entice the nationalists away from the uprising. In neighboring Sindh province,a political witch-hunt has been unleashed against the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), ostensibly to fight corruption, which the military claims is stoking terrorism. Curiously, domestic jihadist groups did not even get a wrap on the knuckles. The legitimacy to unleash havoc in Afghanistan, Balochistan and Sindh, of course, is sought through the magic wand of ‘national interest’, which turns foul to fair in a snap.

In his crisp treatise The Man On Horseback: The Role of The Military In Politics, Samuel Finer cites Victor Hugo who wrote after Louis-Napoleon had legitimized himself by a plebiscite after usurping power: “Mr Bonaparte’s crime is not a crime, it is called a necessity; Mr Bonaparte’s ambuscade is not an ambuscade, it is defense of order; Mr Bonaparte’s robberies are not robberies, they are called measures of state; Mr Bonaparte’s murders are not murders, they are called public safety; Mr Bonaparte’s accomplices are not called malefactors, they are called magistrates, senators and councilors of state; Mr Bonaparte’s adversaries are not soldiers of the law and right, they are Jack Cades, demagogues, communists.”

Finer notes that among the variables that dispose a military to intervene in politics, right up there with their motive is the mood within and outside the military, which along with other factors determines the mode of such intervention. While we all have been writing off an overt military intervention in Pakistan after General Pervez Musharraf’s November 2007 botched attempt at his second martial law, things appear to be moving precariously close to an overt intervention. The media is whipping up an artificial clamoring for a coup d’état — some are calling it a Kemalist intervention — while the mood within the security establishment is betrayed by the outbursts of its officials, especially in Sindh. One wonders whether, despite all the noises about new and improved management, it is just business as usual, which in Pakistan’s case happens to be a crippled democracy alternating with blatant military interventions.

(The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com and he tweets @mazdaki)