M.D. Nalapat
Manipal, India — Founded as it was by a
bacon-friendly, whiskey-drinking Muhammad Ali Jinnah, by the end of the 1950s –
once almost all non-Muslims had been driven out of Pakistan – the country
remained only loosely tethered to the lifestyle encouraged by the ulema, the
body of Koranic scholars that has appeared as the indispensable intermediary
between believers and God in the Islamic world.
Led by officers trained under the British,
the Pakistan army in particular remained secular, although it had used religion
in 1947-48 to try and pry loose Kashmir from India, the country to which its
maharaja had acceded.
All this changed with Prime Minister
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s fateful appointment of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq as
chief of army staff, superseding seven officers, all of whom were better
qualified for the job. Bhutto chose Zia on the basis of the fawning missives he
used to receive from the general, and the deferential – indeed cringing --
manner in which Zia introduced Bhutto to his men during a prime ministerial
visit in 1975.
Such suppleness of spine convinced Bhutto
that in Zia he would have a servile henchman. Instead, a year later, the
general displaced Bhutto in a coup and executed him shortly thereafter.
Zia, at that time the only Wahabbi general
in the Pakistan army, swiftly introduced changes in the institution to bring it
in sync with the extreme philosophy of Ibn Wahhab, whose toxic creed had been
backed by first the United Kingdom and subsequently the United States as a
counter first to Turks, then Arab nationalists and finally, the Soviets. Zia
aligned his country firmly with other Wahabbi states, and began to fill the
officer ranks of the army with recruits from the numerous Islamic seminaries,
or madrassas, that had begun to proliferate in Pakistan during the 1960s.
In one of its most disastrous
miscalculations, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency under William Casey began
arming, training and funding jihadis selected by Zia's men to do battle against
the Soviets in Afghanistan. Had the agency instead used the hundreds of
thousands of Afghan nationalists for the same purpose, the covert war against
the Soviets would have been conducted more effectively.
As it was, the radicalized international
rabble of extremists which Zia patronized subsequently came to power in Kabul
as the Taliban, with the connivance of elements of the Clinton administration,
in 1996. That was the high-water mark of the Zia strategy of leveraging jihad
into strategic gains for Pakistan, as the Taliban was – and still is – a
creature of jihadist elements within the Pakistan army. No wonder the army
claims to be helpless in checkmating the rabble that depend on them for
explosives, communications gear and logistical support.
Since late 2007, when the current chief of
army staff, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, was slated to replace Pervez Musharraf, this
columnist has been skeptical of those – including many in the United States –
who saw the former Inter-Services Intelligence chief as a "moderate."
In actuality, Kiyani is committed to the vision of Zia-ul-Haq, and has
consistently backed the extremist groups now active in Kashmir and Afghanistan.
Those within the military establishment in
Pakistan say that under his watch, sensitive communications equipment as well
as explosives, mostly procured from China, have been clandestinely transferred
to extremist bands. Although the ISI facilitators of such groups instruct them
for the record that these should be deployed in India, they are aware that
since NATO's entry into Afghanistan six years ago, these days almost all the
major jihadi groups focus on that military alliance rather than India as the
target.
Consequently, most of the materiel
ostensibly provided by the ISI to conduct covert war with India gets used
against the United States and its partners in Afghanistan – a fact that is well
known to all intelligence agencies operating in the region. Sunday’s bombing of
the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad indicates that the primary battleground may be
shifting to Pakistan; the explosives used were the type originally intended for
use in India.
The explosives used in the blast contained
sophisticated chemicals designed to cause fire on impact, indicating that
future suicide bombers will be able to inflict considerable damage even if they
detonate their cargo some distance away from their targets. While individuals
in Pakistan claim that these explosives were supplied – to the Pakistan army –
by a country that has been allied with Islamabad since the 1960s, this claim
needs to be verified by investigation. If found true, that country needs to be
warned not to supply such materiel to an army that is known to have close links
with numerous jihadist groups.
After more than six years of denial, the
U.S. military is slowly beginning to understand that the "Afghan"
conflict is in reality seamless combat against a foe that pays no attention to
the artificial boundaries between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Unless Taliban
groups in both countries are taken out, the situation facing the government of
Afghan President Hamid Karzai will continue to deteriorate.
It is unlikely that the U.S. team of George
W. Bush and Dick Cheney will go beyond the mosquito bites inflicted by Predator
unmanned aircraft strikes within Pakistan. What is needed is a strategy of land
and aerial interdiction of supplies from long-established routes on the border,
so the Taliban are denied their sanctuaries in Pakistan.
Although no formal link exists between the
Pakistan army and the militia they helped create, ties of kinship as well as a
shared interest in the narcotics trade ensure that a constant interflow of
information and "advice" takes place between them.
The Marriott attack is the moment of truth
for the Pakistan army. The jihadis’ message is to leave them alone to convert
the border areas into a new Taliban state that can serve as their base for
global operations. At present, instead of accepting that the incident
underscores the need to join with NATO to eliminate the Taliban, General Kiyani
has been muttering about "war" with the United States!
The former Pakistan president and army
chief, Pervez Musharraf, was unable or unwilling to separate the Pakistan army
from the extremists it has nurtured since the 1970s. If Kiyani does likewise,
the stage seems set for one-fifth of the country to become the next Talibanized
state, able to ensure chaos and mayhem in the remaining four-fifths. Those who
are aware of the general's partiality toward jihadis are not hopeful that
Ashfaq Kiyani will make the correct decision – either for his army or for his
battered country.
-(Professor M.D. Nalapat is
vice-chair of the Manipal Advanced Research Group, UNESCO Peace Chair, and
professor of geopolitics at Manipal University. ©Copyright M.D. Nalapat.)
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