The Obama Administration and Pakistan

Immediately on assuming office, President Barack Obama conducted several rapid reviews of policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan and unveiled his first plan on 27 March 2009.

The new policy promised major attention to be paid to what was now termed Af-Pak and the region.

Obama appointed veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke as the Special Envoy for Af-Pak, while General David Petraeus took charge of the US Central Command headquarters. A new US Army doctrine now accepted that stabilising war-torn countries and securing the population was more important than chasing insurgents.

There was to be much more covert and overt pressure on Pakistan to cooperate on curbing Taliban activities on its soil.

The US poured 21,000 marines into southern Afghanistan in the spring of 2009 including 4000 military trainers to speed up the building of the Afghan army and police.

However much of the year was taken up preparing for the presidential elections and ensuring its security. Nevertheless the Afghan government, undermining both the international community and Karzai, who was the overall winner, heavily rigged the August elections. The US was now left without an effective Afghan partner with whom it could work to stabilise the country.

The Taliban took full advantage of this. According to the UN in 2009 there were, on average, 1,200 attacks a month by the Taliban—a 65 per cent increase from the previous year. The Afghan civilian death toll reached 2,412, an increase of 14 per cent. In addition, US and NATO combat deaths rose 76 per cent, from 295 in 2008 to 520 in 2009.

The appointment in 2009 of General Stanley McChrystal as the 324commander of US and NATO forces, signalled the new counterinsurgency strategy and also the US military’s conviction that it could not win the war through military means which would eventually mean holding talks with the Taliban.

Karzai’s representatives had already met with some Taliban figures in Saudi Arabia in early 2009 and their dialogue continued. By the end of 2009 the US and the West had endorsed a ‘reintegration’ plan to bring in Taliban soldiers and commanders by offering them an amnesty and a compensation package. However, there was still US reluctance to follow Karzai’s lead on offering ‘reconciliation’ with the Taliban leadership until they had demonstratively broken their links with al Qaeda.

After three months of deliberation on 1 December 2009, Obama revisited his Afghan strategy at a speech at West Point military academy. He promised 30,000 more troops and a civilian surge in rebuilding the country, but he gave the US Army just eighteen months to diminish the Taliban threat because in July 2011 he would start handing over areas of responsibility to the Afghan government and start withdrawing US troops. Talks with the Taliban now took on a greater momentum.

By 2010 the prevailing view in Washington became that many Taliban fighters in the field could eventually be won over, but that the US troop surge that Obama had ordered had to roll them back first, reversing Taliban successes and gaining control over the population centres and major roads. According to the American strategy that emerged that year, the US military had to weaken the Taliban before negotiating with them. So US strategy aimed only to peel away Taliban commanders and fighters and resettle them without making any major political concessions or changes to the Afghan constitution.

There was another way of looking at the crisis that began building up during 2009-2010. Despite their successes, the Taliban reached the height of their power. They did not control major population centres—nor could they, given NATO’s military strength and air power. The vast majority of Afghans-did not want the return of a Taliban regime despite their anger at the Karzai government and the general international failure to deliver economic progress. This situation offered a critical opportunity to persuade the Taliban that this was the best time to negotiate a settlement, because they were at their strongest since 2001 when US military action 325ousted them from power.

While Washington remained deeply divided about talking to the Taliban leaders the Taliban began to show the first hint of flexibility. The earliest sign came in a ten-page statement issued in November 2009 for the religious festival of Eid. The Taliban leader Mullah Omar, while urging his fighters to continue the jihad against ’the arrogant [US] enemy’, also pledged that a future Taliban regime would bring peace and non-interference from outside forces, and would pose no threat to neighbouring countries— implying that al Qaeda would not be returning to Afghanistan along with the Taliban. Sounding more like a diplomat than an extremist, Omar said, ‘The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan wants to take constructive measures together with all countries for mutual cooperation, economic development and good future on the basis of mutual respect.’

Many considered the Taliban could just sit it out until the Americans started to leave and then lay siege to Kabul. There were several factors that were now forcing the Taliban to talk to Kabul and the US. The Taliban were exhausted after nine years of war and the high toll of casualties they have suffered. They realised they could not govern the country alone even if they regained total power and they wanted to break their dependence on al Qaeda and Pakistan.

As the US military surge got under way in early 2010 in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, there was increasing US pressure for Pakistan to do more to ‘capture or kill’ Afghan Taliban leaders. The Army, which was now fully convinced that it had to eliminate the Pakistani Taliban in FATA, and deployed 140,000 troops to do so, but it still refused to go after Haqqani’s base in North Waziristan.

Pakistan said it was too busy dealing with its own acute problems with the Pakistani Taliban and a growing number of terrorist attacks by various insurgent groups. Its forces were overstretched, it had little money, and it would oblige the Americans only when it was ready to do so. In fact, Pakistan resisted any military offensive against the Afghan Taliban leaders since it long viewed them as potential allies in a post-American Afghanistan, when the US was expected to ditch Pakistan as well.

At the same time the Army remained fearful of a hasty US withdrawal from Afghanistan, which could result in civil war, mayhem in its backyard or the former Northern Alliance retaking power in Kabul. The Army was also 326convinced that the US would do nothing to stem India’s presence in Afghanistan, which grew at Pakistan’s expense.

Pakistan fully supported the idea of talks between the Taliban and Karzai but on its own terms. In February 2010 the ISI and CIA arrested several leading Taliban figures in Pakistan, including the Taliban second- in-command Mullah Abdul Ghani Barader. However the US and other allies were not convinced that the arrests represented a major U-turn by the Pakistani military. Instead it appeared that the Pakistan military and ISI were hardening their terms for a major say in any future dialogue with the Taliban. Barader and other Taliban leaders were at odds with the ISI— wanting to open a dialogue with Kabul but by bypassing the ISI, which is why they used Saudi Arabia as a venue.

The military feared being superseded in any future negotiations in the belief that it had more at stake in Afghanistan than any other neighbouring country. It wanted a major role in any peace talks and aimed to convince the Americans of that. However, the Obama administration is still far from accepting the idea of negotiating with the Taliban leadership. US politicians and officials insisted that the Taliban had to be significantly diminished through military offensives over the coming year before any such talks could take place, although the US military believed that talks should start sooner. All US officials agreed that the Taliban has to first make a decisive break from their operational alliance with al Qaeda.

Pakistan’s Strategic Interests: The Weight of History

What were Pakistan’s strategic interests in Afghanistan that played such a determining role in Islamabad’s policy towards Afghanistan for three decades? How meaningful are those strategic interests today? The relationship between the two countries has been a roller coaster ride but never reached the pitch of antagonism that relations with India did. In 1947 Afghanistan had refused to accept the border between the two countries and was the only nation to oppose Pakistan’s entry into the United Nations. Diplomatic relations were severed twice in 1955 and 1962 following border skirmishes as Kabul laid claim to large parts of the North West Frontier (NWFP) and Balochistan provinces, which Kabul said the British had illegally seized and later incorporated into present day Pakistan.

Intermittently between 1947 and the late 1980s Kabul supported and patronised left wing Pashtun nationalist and autonomist parties in the NWFP and Balochistan who aspired to creating a Kabul-centred ‘Greater Pashtunistan’. In turn, in the 1970s Pakistan sponsored Afghan Islamists who belonged to the Ikhwan and worked for an Islamic revolution in Afghanistan. On the border both countries maintained a balance of power tensions by paying off Pashtun tribes to retain their loyalties. At the same time, with Afghanistan landlocked and totally dependent on Karachi for its port, trade and people-to-people relations remained excellent. For the Pashtun tribes there was no apparent border and they criss-crossed the region freely. Afghanistan remained neutral in Pakistan’s frequent wars and skirmishes with India—a great boon to the military—while the Afghan royal family’s intermarriages with Pakistan’s feudal elite brought the ruling classes together.

However, the end of the monarchy in 1973 and the seizure of power by the King Zahir Shah’s cousin Mohammed Daud saw the revival of the Pashtunistan issue. President Daud, who was allied to the Soviet Union, gave sanctuary to leftist Pashtun and Baloch rebels who in the 1970s were in conflict with Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. The Afghan communists who seized power from Daud in 1978 pursued the same policies.

Thus on the eve of the Soviet invasion the Pakistan military, which itself had seized power, was deeply concerned about threats from Afghanistan. It is therefore not surprising that President Zia was to articulate a major Pakistani strategic interest in the future of Afghanistan, when it came to eliciting aid from the Reagan administration in 1981. Zia was determined that Kabul-backed irredentist movements between Pakistan’s Baloch and Pashtun should never again threaten Pakistan. Pakistan needed a friendly government in Afghanistan that would recognise the Durand Line, cease laying claim to Pakistani territory and stop providing sanctuary to Pakistani dissidents.

One way to ensure this was to back Islamists within the Afghan and Pakistani Pashtuns. The Bhutto government had already pursued this end—training leading members of the Afghan Ikhwan. That the Afghans 328articulated their struggle against the Soviet occupation as a jihad rather than a modern war of national liberation gave further scope to Zia’s ambitions. Both Pakistan and the US were to stretch the jihadi factor further when they turned the Afghan insurgency into a global jihad inviting Muslim fighters from dozens of countries to Peshawar and expanding the war into Soviet Central Asia.

The Mujahideen had no ethnic agenda to divide countries or claim territory because they viewed ethnicity as anathema and the entire Muslim world as a single ummah. For the Army the same mujahideen could be later used to fight Pakistan’s overt war in Indian Kashmir. Zia envisaged a wide zone of influence for Pakistan stretching into Soviet Central Asia as an outcome of the anti-Soviet war. Pakistani Pashtuns were encouraged to take part in the Afghan jihad laying the seeds for the future Pakistani Taliban.

Zia also promoted the idea of Afghanistan offering ‘strategic depth’ to Pakistan—a military doctrine conceived as a counter to an Indian attack with the Pakistan Army having little geographical depth to wage a counter attack from. Elements of the Pakistan Army could retreat or regroup in Afghanistan where Pakistani aircraft and even some of its nuclear arsenal and rockets could be kept out of harms way. (The latter was seriously considered by military officers after the Taliban captured Kabul.)

However, the theory of strategic depth was so thoroughly rubbished in the 1980s by critics—including retired generals—that it disappeared, until it was resurrected in 2009 by the present Army Chief General Ashfaq Kayani, who described it not as military doctrine but as political justification to show Pakistan’s need for a friendly government in Kabul. However with lndia and Pakistan now nuclear powers such conventional warfare talk of territory, geography and safe havens had become even more meaningless. A conventional war that led to Pakistan’s defeat would almost certainly lead to the use of nuclear weapons.

Pakistan’s second strategic claim since the Soviet occupation has been the desire to influence and control the Afghan Pashtuns who should rule Afghanistan but not eye Pakistan’s Pashtun territories. In any future peace settlement this will remain a key demand of the Pakistan military— to ensure that the governors and police chiefs in the southern and eastern provinces are not openly anti-Pakistan. Never again, however, will Pakistan 329enjoy the kind of acquiescence it received from the Taliban regime in the 1990s.

All these advantages were seemingly lost when US pressure forced President Musharraf to help the West oust the Taliban after 9/11. Yet Pakistan was to retain its options, first by winning US support in helping defeat the Taliban and then giving Taliban leaders an escape hatch and sanctuary in Pakistan. The subsequent US failure to develop Afghanistan or send in sufficient troops to secure the country while it prepared for the war in Iraq made the US turn a blind eye to Musharraf’s double game. As long as the Army continued to help detain al Qaeda militants on its soil, the Americans asked no questions about the Afghan Taliban until 2007. The Pakistani Army’s desire to have some control over future events in Afghanistan was also due to its strategic aim of avoiding encirclement by India; but it was also a result of the setbacks it had received since 2001. The military is still smarting from former President Bush’s decisions to allow the anti-Pakistan Northern Alliance to take Kabul in 2001, to ignore Islamabad’s later requests for consultations on US strategy in Afghanistan, and to treat all Afghan Pashtuns as potential Taliban. This helped radicalise Pakistan’s own Pashtun population, which is more than twice the size of Afghanistan’s. (There are twelve million Pashtuns in Afghanistan and twenty-seven million in Pakistan.)

The third strategic interest first outlined by Zia was to never allow India a foothold in Afghanistan. India had remained a staunch ally of the Afghan communist regime and the Soviets, but their diplomatic presence in Kabul ended once the Mujahideen and later the Taliban took over. Throughout the 1990s there was no Indian presence in Afghanistan and the army had considered this a victory. Pakistani and Kashmiri militants were able to train and fight in Afghanistan free of international harassment. Many of these same fighters were to end up as the Punjabi Taliban in 2008, willing to take on their benefactors—the Army—in a bloody war for dominance.

The India factor has now returned with vengeance for the Pakistan Army. When India did return to Afghanistan after 9/11 it found its non- Pashtun allies within the government as it had aided the Northern Alliance in the civil war. It also found many allies among secular and educated Pashtuns who rejected the Taliban and were sick of ISI manipulation. 330India swiftly developed an extremely well-conceived aid program investing approximately US$1.2 billion that spread Indian projects and largesse across all ethnic groups, built key infrastructure projects, set up the transport system in Kabul and contributed to important social programs like health. Unlike Western aid agencies, 80 per cent of Indian money was actually spent on projects as Indian NGOs had low expenditures.

Pakistan’s military believes that India is rapidly expanding its influence across the very same region—Afghanistan and Central Asia— that Zia had first hoped to do so, thereby attempting to encircle Pakistan with a ring of hostile states. Pakistan believes India is also financing and training the renewed Baloch insurgency as several key Baloch leaders now live in exile in Kabul. Pakistan accuses Indian intelligence or RAW of working with Afghanistan’s spy agency the National Directorate for Security (NDS) to help the Baloch insurgents.

Pakistan has declined to offer any concrete evidence about any of these claims either to the public or to the Americans. The ISI has also spread enormous amounts of patently exaggerated propaganda about the extent of the Indian presence, such as claiming that there are a dozen or more Indian consulates in Afghanistan, in order to win over Pakistani public opinion. Even more damaging to relations since 2006 have been the repeated attacks on the Indian embassy, its consulates and road-building projects by Taliban linked to the Jalaluddin Haqqani group, which has a close working relationship with the ISI. The devastating attack on Mumbai in 2008 by Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Taiba, which led to nearly 170 people being killed including many foreigners, was also blamed by India on the ISI, although it is unlikely to have been the case. For more than a year India ceased all dialogue with Pakistan and insists that LeT has to be eliminated before meaningful talks can go ahead.

Clearly, a key element of Pakistan’s future demands will be based on eliminating India’s presence in Afghanistan—a maximalist demand which would be more likely watered down to a lesser demand of asking for a reduction of India’s aid and diplomatic presence on the Pakistan border and the reduction or even closing down of Indian consulates in Jalalabad and Kandahar. However, vital for this is an Indo­Pak dialogue on their mutual interests and competition in Afghanistan and how these can be 331contained and made more transparent to the other side. India poses a real dilemma for the Pakistan Army as it battles the Pakistani Taliban on its own soil. The Army has refused to go up against the key forces that it controls or once controlled that are visibly anti- India—the forces of Haqqani in North Waziristan and the Punjab­ based groups such as LeT. The Army and the government remain in deliberate denial that there is a terrorist threat in Punjab despite dozens of bomb blasts in the province. The reason is that groups like LeT are still maintained by the military as the first line of defence against any Indian attack, as potential fifth columnists who can sow havoc inside India at a time of war and who are loyal to the Army’s raison d’etre to confront India.

Conclusion

Pakistan has legitimate security interests in Afghanistan, but so do other immediate neighbours like Iran, the Central Asian states and near neighbours like India, China and the Arab Gulf states. All of them would likely step up their interference in Afghanistan if they see Pakistan dominating the peace talks. Moreover, too overt a Pakistani role is likely to be rejected by Karzai, the Northern Alliance and Afghan civil society groups and even by many Taliban who would like to end their dependence on Pakistan. The Pakistan military which continues to run the country’s Afghan policy despite an elected civilian government now faces its biggest test—whether it can help bring an end to the war in Afghanistan, gain its minimum strategic interests and not turn the entire region into a cauldron of competition as existed in the 1990s. At the same time, the military has to comprehensively defeat the Pakistani Taliban and their extremist offshoots that continue to wreak havoc in cities across the country.