How many times will we be fooled by the US?

Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Shireen M Mazari

So Senator Kerry has come to do the usual doublespeak to the Pakistani people through its already confused leadership! Like the other US leaders before him, his understanding of Pakistan ran skin deep at best as he tried to justify the drones by declaring that terrorism existed in Pakistan before these attacks. Oh what a revelation Senator; but we all know qualitative difference between the pre- and post-9/11 status of terrorism in Pakistan. And, while some elitist part time residents and drawing room analysts (the very group that they seem to decry) of the capital may see drones as merely red herrings, the fact is that drones have killed almost 900 innocent Pakistanis between 2006 and 2009 and only 10 Al Qaeda targets. The growing instability in the country as well as the IDPs from the drone-hit areas are testimony to the fact that drones create space for future militants; as well as to the fact that the military option has not only failed to stabilise the area but also failed to deny space to the militants. And, no one buys the Pakistani state's whining to the US against the drones as authentic anymore since, if the leadership was truly opposed to these drone attacks, they would simply claim back Bandari air base. Remember also that perception is at least as critical as the reality.

Senator Kerry also talked about his cosponsored bill relating to aid to Pakistan that will be introduced – or may have been introduced – in the US Senate through its Foreign Relations Committee. He declared that there would be no conditionalities and he feigned – because I refuse to believe that a seasoned Senator like Kerry would be so ill-informed on the issue especially when he knew he was travelling to Pakistan – total ignorance about the Pakistan Enduring Assistance and Cooperation Enhancement Act of 2009 already introduced into the House of Representatives by Representative Howard Berman, Democrat from California. The bill, if passed as is, would be as humiliating for Pakistan as the US-bulldozed Platt Amendment of 1903 was for Cuba.

There have already been some comments of this Act in the Pakistani press and some of the clauses are so insulting that any self respecting Pakistani government would begin voicing its outright rejection of any aid tied to these conditions – but there is a deafening silence from our leaders and their diplomatic reps in the US. As for the billions we spend on lobbyists, apparently Ambassador Haqqani has rendered them ineffective.

Coming back to the Berman bill's clauses, there is a truly absurd India-specific clause J which requires Pakistan "not to support any person or group that conducts violence, sabotage, or other activities meant to instil fear in India". This assumes that the Pakistan is indulging in such activities which in itself are unacceptable. Or is the US going to get a similar undertaking from India given the dangerous games RAW is playing within Pakistan? In any event, is Berman truly ignorant – as many US legislators are about foreign affairs – about the existence of a bilateral Pakistan-India anti-terror agreement or is he simply playing to the Indian lobby? Either way, for Pakistan the message is clear.

Clause K is equally humiliating, with a barely veiled effort to target Dr AQ Khan again. It seeks access for US investigators to "individuals suspected of engaging in worldwide proliferation of nuclear materials," and requires Pakistan to "restrict such individuals from travel or any other activity that could result in further proliferation". Berman would have been more useful to his country if he had sought to clarify the US role in proliferation to Israel or to seek more light on the nuclear agreements India signed with Iraq and Iran! In any event, the US has to get over its trauma of Dr A Q Khan and Pakistan's nuclear capability, just as it finally seems to be getting over its Iranian revolution trauma!

The hand of the Indian lobbyists is all over this Bill including in Clause H which requires Pakistan not to provide any support (could also include political and moral since it is open-ended), "direction, guidance to, or acquiescence in the activities of any person or group that engages in any degree in acts of violence or intimidation against civilians, civilian groups or governmental entities" – target being the indigenous freedom struggle in Indian-Occupied Kashmir. Of course, given how the US is intimidating civilians in FATA with the drone attacks, shouldn't our government tell the US this may include them also! If only our leaders had such guts and gumption but all we see them do is fawn and fall all over the US regardless of the impact it has on the country.

Clause I focuses on the Taliban but again with the onus on the Pakistan government, with the underlying insinuation being that it is the Taliban's survival and nurturing is all at the hands of the Pakistani state – this despite the fact that the Pakistani state has lost thousands of its personnel in fighting these forces. If Pakistan's detractors would study history they would realise that asymmetric conflicts for hearts and minds are never won through military means but who can talk sense to a super power that is still subject to irrational behaviour as a result of 9/11 – so much so that it has also forgotten that the perpetrators of 9/11 were rich, westernised Arabs living in Europe and the US.

The Berman bill's title itself – with the acronym PEACE – is a cruel joke on the people of Pakistan and now Senator Kerry has been trying to tell us that his bill will have no conditionalities. That is nothing but a pack of lies; in any case it is irrelevant because now that an earlier bill relating to aid to Pakistan has been introduced in the House, Kerry's bill in the Senate, along with the Berman bill, will eventually go before a conference committee of Congress comprising equal members from the House and the Senate's relevant committees and one bill will be moulded from the two. Given the effective Indian lobbying and the animus that prevails in the US political circles against the nuclear Muslim state of Pakistan, the conditionalities of the Berman bill will not be removed – certainly not all of them. Yet, from Pakistan's perspective, even one of the present conditionalities makes the aid bill humiliating and unacceptable to any nationalist, self-respecting leadership endowed with courage and a sense of history.

Does our leadership fit that bill? Certainly not so far but perhaps a greater reliance on parliament may give them some courage. After all, President Zardari also turned to the same parliament that he had been ignoring in the context of the issue of terrorism, to gain courage on Swat. But Parliament cannot be used selectively and one hopes it will now be more assertive of its powers.

Meanwhile, the US has begun to send drones into Swat to undermine an agreement that has parliament's sanction. The detractors of the peace agreement should realise that while the agreement was certainly signed from a position of weakness, once it is enforced action can be taken against the criminals violating women through acts of flogging and destroying education through burning of schools. After all, amongst the "secret" 14 conditions, are conditions that the Taliban will not prevent women from working or studying, will cooperate in the anti-polio drive, will desist from attacking barber and music shops, will denounce suicide attacks and so on. Given the paucity of the writ of the state, such an agreement, if enforced, can being peace to the local people especially with the army withdrawing and the Taliban agreeing not to display weapons in public and accepting a ban on raising militias. This is not the end of the problem but merely a beginning.

If the state wants to have a better negotiating position it needs to provide security and justice to the people while dialoguing and negotiating with all Pakistani stakeholders backed by, but not unleashed, coercive power of the state. This is the only way to isolate diehard militants. This is also a beginning to deny space for future militants, but that also requires the "adopt a madressah" approach mentioned last week, to go to the roots of the problem. The term Af-Pak has made us a "legitimate" war zone for the Americans with all that that implies. Unless we create space between ourselves and the US, we cannot move to reclaim the lost space of the moderate majority that is the Pakistani nation.



The writer is a defence analyst. Email: callstr@hotmail.com