Afghanistan: A response to Musharraf

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By Ejaz Haider (The writer was a Ford Scholar at the Programme in Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security at UIUC (1997) and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution's Foreign Policy Studies Programme)

Published in The Express Tribune, December 31st, 2010

Former General-President Pervez Musharraf’s article “What should be done in Afghanistan” (December 14) in this newspaper presents a selective narrative. He gives a historical background to position his thoughts on what can be done now and opens the story in 1979, “with the invasion of the country by the Soviet Union”. But the story goes further back in time and has, as its central themes, the non-acceptance by Afghanistan of the Durand Line, claiming the irredenta west of Attock, and its closeness to India.

It is important to note this because Pakistan’s response to developments after former Afghan president Daud Khan’s coup and later, after the Saur Revolution and the subsequent Soviet invasion, was informed by these concerns.

Daud wrested power from King Zahir Shah in July 1973, declared Afghanistan a republic and embarked on a reforms programme. He tried to put down religious elements, brought Afghanistan closer to the Soviet Union, started a massive military modernisation programme and began actively supporting Pashtun nationalism in Pakistan.

Back in 1961, when Daud was prime minister, he had tried to pursue an aggressive policy of supporting Greater Pakhtunistan. The crisis had led Pakistan to close the border with Afghanistan. In 1962, Daud sent a military probe into the Bajaur Agency of Pakistan which was routed. The crisis ended in March 1963, when Daud was asked by Zahir Shah to step down.

Much before the Soviets crossed the Amu Darya, leaders of the jihad had arrived in Peshawar to avoid capture after Daud’s takeover. Those dissidents, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Ahmed Shah Masoud, Abdul Rab Rasool Sayyaf et al, were put on the Frontier Corp’s (FC) aquittance roll by then inspector-general of the FC Brig Naseerullah Babar. Babar also presented a paper to Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government on how to use anti-Daud sentiment to Pakistan’s advantage. It was nothing more than some money and Lee Enfield rifles but gave a foretaste of what was to come.

Fast forward: In an historical irony, Daud fell when he came round to having better relations with Pakistan, Iran and the US, trying to get out of the Soviet influence. The Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) had entrenched itself and the fillip came with the killing of its Parchami ideologue, Mir Akbar Khyber. His funeral got the PDPA to take to the streets and it blamed Daud for the killing and refused to believe the official version that Khyber was killed by Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islami. Daud moved in against the PDPA but by then it was too late. On April 28, 1978, a day after the PDPA-led coup had begun, he was killed along with his family members.

The PDPA regime also faced the rising tide of popular unrest which the Soviets thought was being exploited by the US. In walked the Soviets. That’s the point at which Musharraf’s narrative begins. But the reasons for what Pakistan did, and why it did it, went further back and were related both to Afghanistan and India — the perceived threats and responses and, today, the consequences of that policy.

The US was witnessing a debate between US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski; Vance didn’t think the Soviets were in Afghanistan for any reason bigger than stabilising the PDPA government; Brzezinski argued it was part of a thrust towards the Gulf waters and the Arabian Sea. The latter won and the US mounted the massive effort that ended later with President Ronald Reagan’s rollback policy.

Islamabad found the situation conducive to multiple strategic objectives: exploiting Afghan insurgency to stave off the Pakhtunistan problem; getting military aid to strengthen itself against India; cash inflows to sustain the economy; moving fast-track on its nuclear programme while America looked the other way; getting Kabul at some point to accept the Durand Line; and, if and when the Soviets withdrew, to have a friendly government in Kabul.

Until the Soviets were in Afghanistan, the US-Pakistan interests converged. When they left, some interests diverged. The first break came in 1989, when President George Bush indicated to Islamabad that he would not be able to certify next year that Pakistan was clean on the nuclear front. In 1990, the Pressler Amendment kicked in. Pakistan had specifically asked for Pressler to circumvent the more circuitous Glenn-Symington Amendment. But when Pressler was applied, Islamabad said it had been short-changed.

This is the thrust of Musharraf’s piece: the US left us high and dry. The fact is, the rules of the game related to realpolitik. Pakistan knew it and played the same game. And in Afghanistan, it got more and more involved for its own perceived strategic reasons. The worst part of the strategy, dominated by the army-ISI combine, was the attempt to play kingmaker in that country.

Another dimension was added to the Afghan policy when Indian-held Kashmir suddenly exploded in December 1989. That connection is too well-known to bear repeating. The point is that it is disingenuous to say that Pakistan was left holding the baby.

Internal developments were no less troubling with General Ziaul Haq’s Islamisation drive. Over time, the Islamist proxies that Islamabad was relying on began finding a corresponding streak within Pakistani society. The policy that wanted to reject Afghanistan’s irredentism by getting Kabul to accept the Durand Line ended up creating an Islamist bloc on both sides with deep linkages and rejection of the idea of national boundaries.

The penetration became complete with the Taliban policy, pursued from 1994 onwards, to open up the southern route to Turkmenistan. Again, Pakistan signalled to other players that it was the dominant actor. Musharraf argues that the world should have recognised the Taliban regime because that would have given the world leverage over the Taliban and “we could have saved the Bamiyan Buddha statues and even untangled the Osama bin Laden dispute”.

My question is: we had recognised the Taliban, were supporting them to the hilt and it was in our interest to get them to fall in line; why did we fail to either save the Buddha statues or “untangle the Bin Laden dispute”? Not just that, we couldn’t even get the Taliban to accept the Durand Line! And what Mullah Omar did to Prince Turki al Feisal is already a recorded incident.

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Published in The Express Tribune, January 1st, 2011

Pakistan’s Taliban policy initially had two more actors: Ismail Khan and Rashid Dostum. The policy was pushed by Major-General Naseerullah Babar (retd), then interior minister in Benazir Bhutto’s second government. The ISI was initially reluctant to let go of its old proxies, especially Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami. But Babar managed to sell it to the Agency through a clique of Pashtun officers.

The policy began showing early signs of failure. The intransigent Taliban attacked Herat early in the game, were beaten back and wanted Pakistan’s support to dislodge Ismail Khan. Instead of whipping them into falling in line, Pakistan helped them and thus undercut an essential dimension of its own policy. The Taliban tail, from then onwards, began wagging the Pakistani dog.

The situation reached a point where, having lost the policy direction, Pakistan rested content with putting all its eggs in the Taliban basket. In time, Dostum was also lost. And while the Taliban controlled 95 per cent of the territory, the rest of the world was arrayed against them — and Pakistan — and backed the Northern Alliance.

The US, which had initially gone along with Pakistan for various reasons — not least because of lobbying by the by the American oil giant Unocal for the Turkmenistan oil and gas pipelines and its traditional alliance with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, both of which were backing the Taliban — had jumped off the bandwagon by November 1997 when Madeleine Albright visited Pakistan.

The point is that far from being a passive player left holding the baby, Pakistan was an aggressive, pro-active player trying to shape the environment to its perceived advantage even in the teeth of opposition by a number of other state actors. Attempts by the Foreign Office to change the direction were rebuffed by the ISI.

At home, the Taliban’s literalism was linking up with home-grown extremism, one supplementing the other. It had become, and remains, a classic example of bidirectional causality. And it is this mindset that has made it so difficult for Pakistan — when Musharraf was in power and now — to contain and roll back the menace of extremist terrorism.

The US had become interested in the Northern Alliance also because of the presence in Afghanistan of al Qaeda. The organisation had come into existence in the first phase of the jihad but had become dormant until the Kuwait crisis. Osama bin Laden had left Afghanistan but relocated to Nangarhar after the US missile strikes in Sudan and eastern Afghanistan in August 1998 and pressure brought to bear on Khartoum by Riyadh.

This fact and what al Qaeda was up to were woefully ignored by Pakistan in its drive to back the Taliban. By the time Pakistan and Saudi Arabia got round to dealing with the problem, they found that dealing with Mullah Omar was akin to banging one’s head against a wall.

This is, of course, a very sketchy account. There are innumerable smaller details that are generally important to complete the picture. But I have attempted this for three reasons: all players were playing for their perceived interests, Pakistan most aggressively; the environment was getting shaped to give results which the world saw on 9/11; the area has become a hotbed of extremism and rooting it out would be a long-drawn and very painful process.

Musharraf has given a future road map. Without going into any details, because this is an issue on which I have extensively and repeatedly written in several publications, let me just say that counterinsurgency — the term is used in a broad context — strategies look fairly sexy on the drawing board but yield poor results unless the insurgent/terrorist is dislocated from the context in which he operates.

Musharraf was at the helm for eight years. Most operations undertaken at the time were dismal failures. They were conducted without proper planning, equipment and higher direction. Troops were inducted in operational areas without proper training and it was only in 2008 that the army decided to set up battle inoculation training centres and embarked on a more integrated plan to use force.

But as I have mentioned in two recent articles in this newspaper —“Winning a loss” and “COIN dilemmas” — the challenge is to make the insurgent irrelevant to the population. This is the toughest task in our case because of how the state has shaped society over nearly four decades. The recruitment base is this society and so far we have been unable to target and contain this base.

Musharraf is right about bringing moderation to society. But he should also concede his own failure on that count. He could not change the syllabi for political reasons. Neither Musharraf’s government nor the present one has been able to control the mosque and the seminary. Banned extremist groups have continued to resurface under new names and sectarian hatred continues to take toll of precious lives.

Sections of the media have only made the task of correction for the state more difficult. Glasnost has come without perestroika and has confounded the confusion. On top of all this, there is no indication that the army-ISI combine has changed its strategic and threat perceptions.

Musharraf talks about the groups for which there is tremendous sympathy in Pakistan. That is the problem. Just because some groups might be facing India rather than the West, or troubling us internally, does not mean they afford a lesser ideological threat to this state. Public sympathy is what has made it so difficult for the state to isolate and destroy these groups. And it is precisely for this reason that Musharraf, while accepting that al Qaeda is now spread out in the world, argues that “the centre of gravity of all this extremism and terrorism, however, lies in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan.”

He is only partially right. This menace does not have any defined centre of gravity now, the threat having become protean. But yes, it is greater here than elsewhere because the society as a whole is out of joint. This is why it is so difficult to implement the strategy of dislocation.