Pakistan

[Michael Perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Le Monde diplomatique                                         October
2001

Pakistan: the destabilisation game

     by Selig S. Harrison *

October 1999 was a decisive date for Pakistan. The army seized power,
ousting the elected prime minister Nawaz Sharif and abruptly changing
the
balance of political forces. For the first time militant Islamic groups
with
close ties to Afghanistan-based Osama Bin Laden acquired a veto over
Pakistani foreign and defence policy. The new regime in Islamabad put
forward a moderate, pro-American front man, General Pervez Musharraf.
But
from the start he was beholden to a clique of hard-line nationalist
generals
who have been building, for more than a decade, a close network of
militant
Islamic groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan to lead efforts to
destabilise
India.

The real power in Islamabad is General Muhammad Aziz, who played a key
role
in the 1999 coup as deputy army chief of staff under Musharraf, and has
now
been promoted to corps commander in Lahore. Musharraf is an
Urdu-speaking
refugee from India with no indigenous base in Pakistan. General Aziz
speaks
Punjabi, the language of Pakistan's dominant Punjab province, and is a
leader of the Sudhan clan, a tight brotherhood of 75,000, with a strong
martial and religious tradition, in command of the Poonch district of
the
Pakistani-controlled part of Kashmir.

Aziz, with his roots in Kashmir and a long record of military service
there,
masterminded the invasion of the Kargil area on the Indian side of the
Kashmir cease-fire line early in 1999 (1). During and after the Afghan
war,
he directed Pakistani intelligence activities in Afghanistan, setting up
the
training camps for two key groups in the network of militant Islamic
organisations spanning the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The most
important
was Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is primarily Pakistani in membership but has
a
substantial component of Afghans, who are, in effect, part of the
Taliban
secret police, helping to crush opponents of the TaIiban. Another was
Harekat-ul-Ansar, the group responsible for the hijacking of an Indian
airliner in January 2000. The United States designated the Harekat a
terrorist organisation in 1997 and attacked its Afghan camps as part of
the
US 1998 cruise missile assault against Bin Laden's infrastructure in
reprisal for attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

The origins of the hard line now dominant in Pakistan's armed forces
date
back to the Bangladesh freedom movement and India's military support for
its
secession in 1971. Pakistan's humiliating defeat then was a turning
point in
the history of its army. A new generation of officers has since grown up

nursing a bitter determination to get even with India. This has
coincided
with the transition from a Sandhurst-educated generation of
cosmopolitan,
elitist officers epitomised by the late president Ayub Khan (1958-71),
to a
new generation of more insular officers with rural and middle class
roots.
Many of this new generation have been receptive to the religious appeals

made by Islamic groups, which suddenly expanded with the official
encouragement of the Zia ul Haq regime (1977-88) during the Afghan war.

Zia deliberately created a powerful group of like-minded officers,
centred
in the intelligence agencies, driven by an ideology that mixed
anti-Indian
nationalism with messianic Islam. In a conversation with Zia on 29 June
1988, six weeks before his death, he told me that his goal was a
strategic
realignment in South Asia. Pakistan needed a satellite state in Kabul,
he
said, so that its western front would be secure and it could face India
without worrying about the possibility of a pro-India Afghanistan. And
Pakistan was destined to lead a pan-Islamic confederation.

"You Americans wanted us to be a front-line state," Zia said. "By
helping
you we have earned the right to have a regime to our liking in
Afghanistan.
We took risks as a front line state and we won't permit it to be like it
was
before - with Indian and Soviet influence and claims on our territory.
It
will be a real Islamic state, a real Islamic confederation, part of a
pan-Islamic revival that will one day win over the Muslims in the Soviet

Union. We won't have passports between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Who
knows,
perhaps Tajikistan and Uzbekistan may join, maybe some day even Iran and

Turkey."

Fighting the Soviets

The current rise of militant Islam in South Asia is a legacy of the
uncritical support given by the US during the Afghan war to Zia and his
Interservices Intelligence Directorate (ISI). The Reagan administration
had
one myopic objective after the Russians blundered into Afghanistan: make
it
hot for them and tie them down there to relieve Soviet pressure
elsewhere.
The US made the historic mistake of letting Pakistan decide which groups
in
the Afghan resistance got the $3bn that the US and its friends poured
in.
Most of it went to militant Islamic groups that represented a minority
of
Afghans, but were favoured by the ISI.

Another CIA mistake was encouraging Islamic militants from all over the
world to come to Afghanistan to join the jihad. Afghanistan became a
base
for Bin Laden and a wide variety of kindred groups during the late
1980s,
while the war was still on; and the flow of jihadis from other parts of
the
Islamic world intensified after the Russians left. This was actively
encouraged by the ISI and the CIA. I often talked with American
diplomats
and CIA people involved and warned them that the US was creating a
monster.
They said that the more militant the jihadis were, the more fanatically
they
would fight against the Russians. Many of the former ISI generals, who
are
leading players in today's recycled military regime, became key actors
in
the military regime that took power in 1999.

The ISI channelled aid to Islamic militants even though they had much
less
indigenous strength than moderate Afghan elements based among the
Pashtun
tribes (2). Pakistan feared that, after the war, the Pashtun majority in

Afghanistan might revive its claim to the Pashtun Northwest Frontier
province of Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan, which was conquered by the
British Raj and handed over to Pakistan when it was created in 1947.

The ISI objective was to find Afghan collaborators capable of
establishing
and sustaining a Pakistani-oriented client state after the war. At first
the
ISI picked Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the ultra radical
Hezb-I-Islami,
to be its man in Kabul after the Russians left. But Hekmatyar had little

popular support and was dropped when the Taliban appeared.

The Taliban was an authentic Afghan response to the corruption of the
resistance groups built by the ISI. The mullahs who created it had
indigenous standing, unlike Hekmatyar. But the Taliban acquired military

muscle and the money needed to operate only because it won Pakistani and

Saudi support (3). The Taliban did not win its military victories with
the
help of students from madrasas. The ISI and the Pakistani armed forces
provided weaponry, logistical help and manpower - not only Pakistani
manpower but trained Afghan officers and soldiers from the former
Communist
army who are now on the ISI payroll.

The ISI used American money and weaponry to establish an entrenched
power
base within the Pakistani military and bureaucratic structure, and
continued
to exercise power during the civilian regimes of Benazir Bhutto
(1993-96)
and Nawaz Sharif (1997-99) who followed Zia, as well as during the
current
military regime. When Sharif launched an attempt at peace with India,
culminating in the Lahore summit meeting with Prime Minister Atul Behari

Vajpayee in February 1999, the ISI and its allies in the military high
command led by General Aziz, then deputy army chief of staff, were
outraged.


The Kargil offensive in May, a direct transgression of the Kashmir
cease-fire line, was calculated to prevent peace. Sharif was not asked
for
his approval until it was too late to stop it. He eventually asserted
himself by ordering a pullback from Kargil in August in spite of the
protests of the army and the ISI, leading to a showdown with the forces
and
his ousting in the coup.

Although Musharraf has promised elections next year, his recent
assumption
of the presidency suggests that he is comfortable as a front man, and
that
military hard-liners, together with their militant Islamic allies, will
remain the real powers in Pakistan.

American pressures for military and intelligence cooperation in pursuing
Bin
Laden and his followers have aggravated what were already serious
internal
stresses within the regime. If Musharraf goes too far in meeting US
demands,
he will extend just enough cooperation to maximise US concessions while
avoiding a confrontation with the hard-liners by closing his eyes to
continued covert ISI support of the Taliban [if of course they still
exist].
Whatever happens, Islamabad is not likely to abandon its goal of a
satellite
state in Kabul that fulfils Zia's dream of a "strategic realignment".

* Member of the Century Foundation, Washington, and author, with Diego
Cordovez, of Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet
Withdrawal,
American Philological Association, 1995

(1) See Ignacio Ramonet, " The Pakistan threat ", Le Monde diplomatique
English edition, November 1999.

(2) Until the 19th century the Afghan state (founded in 1747 by Pashtun
tribes led by Ahmad Shah Durrani) included the Pashtun areas of what is
now
north-west Pakistan. The British Raj then annexed Afghan territory
between
the Indus River and the Khyber Pass. Half of the Pashtuns were thus
removed
from the control of Kabul. Britain added insult to injury by instating,
in
1893, the Durand line which guaranteed this conquest and then ceding the

territory to Pakistan in 1947. By dividing the Pashtuns, the British
created
an explosive irredentism which has always haunted successive regimes in
Kabul and which has done much to poison relations between Pakistan and
Afghanistan.

(3) See Ahmed Rashid, "Taliban stir up regional instability", Le Monde
diplomatique English edition, November 1999, and Gilles Dorronsoro,
"Afghanistan all alone", Le Monde diplomatique English edition, June
2001.



Original text in English




--

Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax 530-898-5901