THE STATE AND NATIONAL RELEVANCY
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
With the army busy fighting bush fires that are sapping away its capacity in terms of sheer manpower as it moves into Swat and into Darra Adam Khel and into Kohat as well as re-seeking control of the ring of forts in Waziristan, clearly even though it is managing to gain or regain control of the salients, its' successes are at a tactical level. These tactical military encounters are being conducted within an adverse strategic environment which in turn limits success and also threatens to suck the army into a widespread arena of bush fires where just as one is put out, another flares up. Pakistan has gradually been sucked into its own war on terror and it needs to alter its strategic environment at the political level to a more favourable and supportive one if its tactical military successes are going to translate into an overall strategic success.
So what is the hostile strategic environment? There is an externally hostile one as well as a growing internally hostile environment for the state. Before identifying these in detail, it needs to be stated that a nuclear Pakistan located in its critical geostrategic position will by definition be a relevant strategic player -- both to states within the region as well as extra regional powers -- regardless of the status of its relations with them. In fact it is the relevancy that is seen as an issue by extra regional powers like the US and what we need to ensure against is their effort to reduce this relevancy by getting us bogged down in our internal crises and external absurdities.
The externally hostile environment is largely the making of the US and its post-9/11 military-centric war on terror. Just as the chaos in Iraq and the weakening of the Arab polities has been part of the US agenda, with 9/11 providing the pretext, so the war in Afghanistan has provided the US an opportunity to weaken, perhaps Balkanise and attempt to take out Pakistan's nuclear assets. Articles by US analysts that focus on these issues are not random thoughts but carefully orchestrated campaigns at the declaratory level. As for the war on terror, it is not by accident that the US has managed to shift the centre of gravity of this war from Afghanistan to Pakistan. Now it is seeking to create a scenario whereby it can rationalise the physical intervention of its military into Pakistan. It is indeed an irony that a country that to date has had not one success in any unconventional war post-1945 -- beginning with the failure in Vietnam -- should have the audacity to suggest it can come to Pakistan's assistance in the tribal belt. Even more in what can be regarded as black humour it has offered to enhance training of our troops in counter insurgency. Surely that will mean that whatever our military does know of counter insurgency will be lost successfully after US training. History, Iraq and Afghanistan should paint a clear picture for the Pakistan military in terms of the US competency in counter insurgency!
But coming back to the one US success -- of moving the centre of gravity of the war on terror into Pakistan. After all, was it not a deliberate policy to allow Al-Qaeda and the fighting Taliban an escape route from the south into Pakistani territory rather than moving in from the north and south right at the start of the war in Afghanistan post-9/11? There is also the increasing strategic partnership between the US and India that has allowed India new space on Pakistan's western borders with all the adverse fallouts that represents for Pakistan's security. Nor is it simply a coincidence that at a time when the US is seeking greater intervention militarily in Pakistan, the Indian naval chief declares that Gwadar has "serious strategic implications for India".
Is it not strange that this statement comes after the management of the port has been handed over to Singapore Port? As for the reference to Gwadar giving Pakistan, and my inference China, control of the "world's energy jugular", the Indian naval chief has conveniently forgotten that it is India and the US who are seeking this control in their agreement to jointly patrol the Indian Ocean from the Red Sea to the Malacca Straits; and India's establishment of the Far East Command on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, thereby giving itself the ability to choke the flow of energy through the crucial Malacca Straits. Perhaps the most threatening aspect of the Indian naval chief's statement is within the context of the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) -- another venture of the coalition of the willing in which India was invited to join by the US. After all, the PSI members accord themselves the right to physical interdiction and the Indian naval chief's statement coincided with suggestions by the US that it could enter Pakistan's tribal areas through a "joint" Pak-US military operation. If one examines patterns and holistic pictures, seemingly disconnected events can be seen to be intrinsically linked.
That is why it is imperative to reassess the cooperation with the US and to evolve a counter-terror strategy premised on indigenous assumptions and ground realities. To counter the developments in FATA as well as in the settled areas of the NWFP, the Pakistan military cannot fight without the support of the nation as a whole, as well as political and economic inputs from the state. Otherwise the army will expend all its force fighting bush fires, no matter how successfully. At the tactical level also, military action must be followed by immediate economic infusions, as well as a minimal structure of an effective civil administration on the ground that can provide some semblance of governance, health and basic schooling facilities as well as speedy justice for the local people. If prominent locals can be recruited for this purpose, so much the better. Adhocism has to be the rule to start with, to get over bureaucratic red tapism.
However, at the domestic strategic level a more favourable environment has to be created politically across the country. We are in the throes of electioneering as civil society awaits a return to full-fledged democracy. But have any of our political leaders focused on the issue of the war on terror. Has any party given any detailed intent of how it expects to fight the menace of terrorism? While many statements have come forward on how democracy will offer a better option of fighting terrorism, how this will be done has not been explained. It is astonishing how, in the face of the growing challenge of terrorism in Pakistan, the issue has barely aroused political and public debate. Yet, unless there is an awareness of what is actually happening in FATA and some of the settled parts of the NWFP, there can be no building of a national consensus that is required to back the military action.
Worse still, our government is increasingly making us a laughing stock thanks to emotive outbursts and contradictory statements, along with efforts to maintain secrecy over events which by definition cannot be kept under wraps. Systems and due process have been all but destroyed so that personalised governance is increasingly the order of the day. It is almost as if the government is becoming irrelevant to the ground realities of Pakistan and its people, thereby fostering a hostile domestic environment in which a strategic war on terror cannot be conducted successfully. Till we realise that the state has to make itself relevant and credible to its own people first, their will continue to be a disconnect between the nation at large and the state, and we will not be able to move beyond efforts to douse the terrorists' bush fires.
The writer is director general of the Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad Email: smnews80@hotmail.com
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