A stitch in time

The United States is once again sending us tough messages and implied threats, and pushing us to revoke the Waziristan peace accord. Fighting the terrorists and securing the stability of Afghanistan and our border region is both our international obligation and in our national interest. But what are the best means to achieve these objectives?
Our relations with the United States are passing through yet another phase of turbulence and uncertainty. With a rather predictable upsurge in Taliban operations in Afghanistan in recent months, Washington and some of its European allies have begun to question our intentions, ability, and resolve to stay on their side of the war on terror.
The lack of appreciation of the price we have paid and may continue to pay and the pain that many citizens have suffered for following the American line on sensitive national security issues has rightly angered many Pakistanis, in the government as well as the opposition.
What is happening inside Afghanistan and in the bordering areas of Pakistan is a blowback of the policies that we pursued in the second wave of the Cold War as an American ally and front-line state against the former Soviet Union. Then, according to American strategic thinking, the communists were the greatest enemies of humanity, a source of trouble around the world and a primary threat to the stability of the global system. Islamists from all over the world were encouraged, trained, financed and supported in the war against the Soviets. The United States and Pakistan did not give serious consideration to the long-term effects of Islamic insurgency, militarisation and empowerment of multi-ethnic Muslim groups that came to dominate the Afghan jihad.
We cannot throw that experience in the dustbin of history and forget about it; its effects are very much with us in Afghanistan and in distant places around the world. For this reason, when we agreed to support the US war on terror and provide Washington every facility it needed from us to remove the Taliban, quite a few leaders and commentators in Pakistan raised serious questions. These questions were not about the morality and legality of the actions that the United States was contemplating at that time, but about how dangerous and difficult it would be to comply with an unending list of unreasonable American demands.
In my judgement, we hardly had any viable alternative except to assist the United States in Afghanistan. They doubt our commitment and sincerity as an ally, and continually point their finger to us for the resurrection of the Taliban insurgency; would they have accepted and respected our neutrality? Not really.
The Americans lost sight of some of the bitter realities of asymmetrical conflicts in their post-9/11 national fury. Vietnam slid down in their historical memory and the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan did not figure much in their reflections either. They had a new enemy in political, militarist Islam, which was immediate and visible in Al Qaeda and their Taliban protectors. But they forgot about a long patch of Afghanistan’s history in which they had aligned with the Islamist forces. The new adversary of the United States had its genesis in that country’s own anti-communist strategy, and also in the many wrongs it had committed against the Arabs and Palestinians in support of Israel.
Pakistan and the world understood the Americans’ logic in going after the Taliban. There was hardly any international outcry against the American invasion of Afghanistan; rather there was great support for the military operation against the Taliban within and outside the region. There was and is vast support for rebuilding Afghanistan as a united, secure, stable and peaceful nation. But the degree of that support and goodwill for the United States and others engaged in the war against the Taliban is dwindling fast. Plenty of time, money and policy have been wasted in a wrong focus on war rather than on economic reconstruction.
The policy that started with winning the hearts and minds of the Afghans has ended up in a big mess, generating widespread anti-American sentiments in Afghanistan and its neighbourhood. The United States is being viewed increasingly as an occupation force and not a liberator from the Taliban. US policymakers are not examining their own failures and weaknesses, nor are they looking at the ethnic lopsidedness of the power structure they have created in Afghanistan.
Contrary to their original expectations, the United States and its coalition partners faced one of the toughest resistances ever last year, and now they are gearing up to confront a larger-scale Taliban insurgency in the coming months. One of the major flaws of American strategy has been its heavy reliance on guns and bombs, a repeat of the mistake that the Soviets made. In arrogantly bombing the Afghans to dust, the US has learnt nothing from the Afghan history.
Pakistan was tasked to control the border and flush out Al Qaeda and the Taliban in an effort to sanitise Afghanistan. It employed the same elements of strategy in the border regions that the United States did on the other side of the border: a larger military presence, in some areas for the first time in Pakistan’s history, arrest of foreign and Pakistani terrorists and military operations against their mountain hideouts.
It was a controversial policy from the outset because Pakistani forces often took military action against their own people and on their own territory. The political and security costs of these operations have been horrendous. Not only have we lost more than 700 of our security personnel but destabilised the entire Pashtun belt along the Afghan border. A good number of Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border have become alienated and have increasingly drifted back to giving support to the Taliban insurgency.
Pakistan attempted to reverse this trend by signing a peace accord with the tribes in Waziristan last September. The deal promised peace and stability in return for cessation of hostilities and pullback of Pakistani forces. I do not think we gave enough time to the tribesmen or reposed enough trust in them to contain or expel foreign militants operating from their regions.
Afghanistan and the United States did not receive our Waziristan accord well from the beginning. They interpreted it as surrender to the terrorists and weakening of Pakistan’s resolve to stay the course in the war on terror. Without giving any chance to the accord to succeed, the United States launched a missile attack in Bajaur in October, practically killing the deal. This and other strikes later have heated tempers once again; as a result we face suicide bombers everywhere.
The United States is once again sending us tough messages and implied threats, and pushing us to revoke the Waziristan peace accord. Fighting the terrorists and securing the stability of Afghanistan and our border region is both our international obligation and in our national interest. There should be no doubt about it. But what are the best means to achieve these objectives? Military means are essential, but they must be linked with a broader strategy of economic reconstruction, social development and building networks of political trust among the local communities.
Bringing the state in its most brutal aspects into areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan where it was historically absent has provoked conflict. The state must rather seek entry into these zones through softer weapons of development and friendly assistance to their communities. That would gradually isolate the terrorists and defeat them and their ideology of violence. It is never too late to think out of the box.
The author is a professor of Political Science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.