Geopolitical Analysis

By Maharaj K. Kaul,

Michael Krepon’s recent analysis “Pakistan’s Future and U.S. Assistance” [1], appears more to be an apology for the failing state of Pakistan rather than a dispassionate analysis that would produce solutions to halt and reverse the rapidly deteriorating state of affairs in that country. The progressive Talibanisation of Pakistan poses a serious threat not only to Pakistan but to all the countries in its neighbourhood. Yet, instead of identifying the evil forces in Pakistan and then prescribing a bitter pill for its recovery, Krepon continues to show more sensitivity towards those very power wielders of Pakistan who have wrecked that country.  One does not have to be a South Asian expert to analyze what ails Pakistan. But what some so-called experts do is to simply obfuscate the issues. 

Take for instance Michael Krepon’s statement in the article that the Pakistani army “has been trained and equipped to fight Hindus and not Muslims.” There is no doubt that the Pakistan Army has derived its enormous power from its relentless propaganda against India. The educational material in schools reeks with hate against Hindus and India. That is the major disease that afflicts Pakistan, even today. It is the outcome of Pakistani elite’s refusal to accept the verdict of history – that the large feudal Muslim empire of yesteryears in India is long gone and that today’ s descendents of those ruling classes will have to share power and resources in a democratic setup with those who were their infidel subjects three hundred years back. That was the reason for the creation of Pakistan and that remains the reason for Pakistan’s pathological hostility to India.  That also is the reason why Pakistan has often sought confrontation with India all these sixty years of existence rather than cooperation.

Pakistan started the 1947 war against India, then the 1965 war, then also the 1971 war and finally the 1999 Kargil invasion. In the 1980s it also started a proxy war in Kashmir which continues to bleed India. Retired Air Marshall Asghar Khan of the Pakistan Air Force, a rare individual of integrity and wisdom, has criticized Pakistan’s ruling classes for being obsessed with the Indian ‘threat.’  At a recent address he gave to Jinnah Society in Karachi on April 20, he reiterated what he has long believed in.

‘Until recently when the so-called Taliban became a problem, our defence expenditure was meant only to meet a threat from India. The fact is that in the last 60 years of our existence, India has not started hostilities against Pakistan unless provoked to do so, or until we created conditions, as we did in 1971 in East Pakistan, for India to interfere militarily…. [2]

It is true that the very basis of Pakistan has been its hostility towards its Hindu-majority neighbor and, therefore, Pakistan Army’s focus was the Hindu ‘enemy’. But to state that the Pakistan Army was not trained to fight Muslims, as Michael Krepon does, is to demonstrate historical amnesia. In 1969, Pakistan Army intervened in the Yemen civil war and obviously killed fellow Muslims there; in 1970 Zia-ul-Haq, the future President of Pakistan, along with the Pakistan military advisory group, led the Jordanian Army’s 2nd Division in massacring Muslim Palestinians in that country; in 1971, Pakistan Army slaughtered possibly as many as 3 million people of the then East Pakistan (later Bangladesh), a lot of whom were Muslims. About 10 million were sent fleeing into India to escape Pakistan Army’s murderous assault on the Bengalis, both Hindu and Muslims. Then in the 1980s Pakistan worked together with the U.S., Saudi Arabia and China to destroy a forward looking Afghanistan. As many as 2 million fellow Muslims were killed under the command of, and many times with the participation of, the Pakistan Army.  About 8 million fellow Muslims were turned into refugees.

Pakistani Army has killed many, many more Muslims than Hindus of its ‘enemy’ India during its violent 60 year history.  Most Hindus it has killed were its own Bengali citizens before 1971.

At another place Krepon writes:

This nation has a very long way to travel toward democratization, but penalizing the Army to reinforce weak political leaders is not a recipe for the successful prosecution of the Taliban.  It is exceedingly hard to demand democratic reforms when barbarians are at the gate.

The barbarians have been brought to the gates by the very Pakistani Army from whom Krepon expects deliverance. Pakistan began to sink into fundamentalist abyss right from the time the Pakistani Army first decided to displace civilian authority and rule Pakistan. It is the Pakistani Army which is the main villain in Pakistan. The Army has ensured that the political leadership remains weak and subservient to the Army. The army needs to be cut to size, moved from the border with India to face Taliban threat on the west, and not pampered as Krepon does. Pakistan is about a seventh of India in size and yet its Army is about half the size of Indian Army, and so is its defense budget, despite the absence of any threat from its neighbors.  India’s defense requirements are dictated by threats both from the north and the west, whereas Pakistan’s, until the coming of Taliban, had no perceivable threat from any quarter.

Pakistani elite still cannot extricate itself from the hallucinatory visions of the ‘glory’ of their past when their kind ruled over millions of infidel Hindus.  This elite therefore cannot reconcile itself to a rising Hindu-majority India, so India has to be ‘bled by a thousand cuts.’  Just the existence of a democratic India, no longer ruled by the Muslim elite, gives the reactionary feudals in Pakistan and their Army nightmares. That is the disease that Pakistan needs to be cured of. Using Krepon’s own language, “neat policy prescriptions confidently offered from the comforts of academia and think tanks are unlikely to appreciably change the current mess that confronts Pakistan.”   Very true!

Elsewhere Krepon write: “It is especially galling to many Pakistanis that the United States, like the Soviet Union in the 1980s, is bombing targets on Pakistani soil.”

Now here is sheer propaganda coming from a so-called south Asia expert. Soviets never bombed any targets on Pakistani soil when there were many that would have been legitimate targets. And if it upsets Pakistanis that the U.S. is bombing terror centers in Pakistan, they can put a stop to such bombing if they genuinely so desire. All they have to do is to demand that the 620,000 strong Pakistani Army, with 550,000 in reserves, a professional army and not a rag-tag gaggle of Taliban fighters, launch a full-scale assault on Taliban strongholds and destroy them militarily and organizationally. Pakistan’s well-disciplined professional army has the ability to do it, if it is willing to move more troops into the western FATA areas from bases close to its border with India, and willing to militarily engage Taliban rather than cut peace deals with them. But Pakistan is willing to do neither.  In the words of the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, one measure of success of any Pakistani efforts to confront Taliban is the extent to which Pakistan military is moving its troops from the Indian border to the Afghan border. That is what must be the emphasis on the U.S. Pakistan policy.

Pakistan Army does not need more military hardware to undertake this task as Krepon advocates. Pakistan Army is well equipped to take on Islamic insurgents on its west. It does not need to acquire Predator drones from the U.S. and conduct its own drone attacks as many Pakistani officials have asked for in the past. The U.S. drone flights take off from Pakistani bases at Shamsi with Pakistan’s consent, though, for public consumption, they show their resentment at U.S. drone use. The U.S. shares intelligence collected by Predator drones with Pakistan which has never been put to good use. Furthermore, Pakistan makes its own intelligence gathering drones, which have never been used against the Taliban. It is thus not the military hardware that is standing in the way of Pakistan army’s effectiveness against Taliban. It is their lack of will and their unremitting pathological hate of India.

Pakistan Army sees Taliban as a strategic asset to be used against both India and Afghanistan. Thus Taliban is not seen as the enemy but an asset! It is India which continues to be perceived as an enemy and a threat. The propaganda against India has sunk so deep and so wide that most Pakistanis believe that India has a ring of consulates (as many as ten) in Afghanistan whose purpose is to destabilize Pakistan; that Balochistan insurgency is instigated by India; and that Indian intelligence agencies are behind the many bomb blasts that have taken place in Pakistan.  The paranoia is widespread, assiduously fostered by the Pakistani Army and the elite over six decades, to keep themselves and the Pakistan’s feudals in power.  That is the reality the U.S. has to account for in developing its Pakistan policy. The late April-May activity in Buner region, where many Taliban fighters are reported to have been killed, could simply be a smokescreen to prepare a conducive atmosphere for Zardari’s 6th May meeting with Obama to extract more aid from the U.S.

There is only one effective weapon that the U.S. possesses, to make Pakistan Army fall in line, give up its hostility towards India and meet the internal threat from Taliban. And that weapon is the weapon of aid.  Yes, it is true that the “U.S. assistance might be more effective and appreciated if it is allocated at the district level for clinics, schools, and improved sewer and water quality.” But with the experience of a history of gross abuse of U.S. aid in the past, it is clear that no aid will reach those for whom it is intended, unless the U.S. puts in an effective accountability mechanism in place, which Krepon does not seem to be very comfortable with.  Any military aid to Pakistan will be counterproductive as it will simply reinforce the feeling in the Pakistani Army that it has a license to do whatever pleases it.  And then it will be business as usual.

In her recent blog “Stop Funding My Failing State,” Fatima Bhutto, niece of late Benazir Bhutto, writes:

No amount of money, especially in the hands of a famously corrupt government, is going to help Pakistan stave off terror, especially when said government seems more than willing to capitulate to the militants they’re supposed to be using that money to save the world from. Since 2001, Pakistan has been a country in decline. We suffer a suicide-bombing rate that surpasses Iraq’s. The billions of dollars we have received have not made Pakistan safer, they haven’t made our neighbors safer, and they’ve done nothing in the way of eradicating terror. Instead, we now have our own version of the Taliban busy blowing up trade routes and flogging young girls.

The Taliban and their ilk, on the other hand, are able to seat themselves in towns and villages across Pakistan without much difficulty largely because they do not come empty-handed. In a country that has a literacy rate of around 30 percent, the Islamists set up madrassas and educate local children for free. In districts where government hospitals are not fit for animals, they set up medical camps—in fact, they’ve been doing medical relief work since the 2005 earthquake hit Northern Pakistan. Where there is no electricity, because the local government officials have placed their friends and relatives in charge of local electrical plants, the Islamists bring generators. In short, they fill a vacuum that the state, through political negligence and gross graft, has created. [3]

Pakistan has been pampered by the U.S. for many decades because the former has served its cold war policy objectives very well. The jehadis that the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and China, created and nurtured have now come to haunt the U.S.  The solution does not lie in appeasing Pakistan further but by finding ways to reduce the power of the Army and the ISI in dictating Pakistan’s India-centric hostile foreign policy, and assisting in the democratization of Pakistan. It is a long process but the first steps need to be taken now.

1. Pakistan’s Future and U.S. Assistance, by Michael Krepon, Stimson Center

2. Wise Words from an Old Warrior, By Ardeshir Cowasjee, Sunday, 26 Apr, 2009

3. Stop Funding My Failing State, by Fatima Bhutto, April 26, 2009, Daily Beast.