Chaos in Pakistan

By Intikhab Amir
Toronto

Dated April 2009

With Pakistan sinking deep into lawlessness and chaos, the West’s anxiety is growing.

Pakistan’s inability to effectively deny its territory as a safe sanctuary to the unbridled Taliban has left the international community more focused on Afghanistan than ever before. Similarly, it has helped the entangled South Asian nation to remain as vital to the West today in its fight against Al-Qaeda and Taliban as it used to be in the 1980s – when it was the agent and conduit for the disbursement of American and Saudi money among the ‘Mujahideens’ (holy fighters), who fought against the ‘godless’ Russians.

Two decades back, Pakistan helped the Capitalist West snatch a win out of the jaws of defeat – the Communist Russian troops withdrew from Afghanistan after they could not withstand American military technology, Saudi and American money, and Mujajideen zeal.

However, today’s Pakistan, facing a threat to its existence in the present form because of militancy, is a different story.

It is far weaker from within than it used to be in the late 1970s. Twenty years of military dictatorships and ten years of indirect military rule during the past thirty years have turned it into a garrison state. It lacks national cohesion. Its citizens have a little say in the country’s decision-making process. The gap between the rich and the poor is growing, its economy needs bailouts from the international lending institutions, and it might be difficult for it to survive the tide of economic hardships without aid from the United States.

Moreover, its military continues to be reluctant to stop meddling in political affairs. Its democratic institutions are weak being nascent. Its political elite tends to be power hungry, self-centered, and always ready to play into the hands of the military commanders. Its intelligence agencies are suspected of harboring international terrorist groups, including the Taliban and Laskar-e-Taeba.

Internationally, it is being regarded as a country that is providing strategic depth to the West’s enemies: Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. It has been unable to stop the Taliban from using Pakistan’s tribal territory to encamp and train militants, and plan operations to launch insurgent attacks inside Afghanistan.

Adding insult to injury, all this has been happening at a time when Pakistan has already deployed about 100,000 army troops in the restive tribal territory, but without much success as these troops could neither effectively control the cross border movement of Taliban insurgents to and from Afghanistan nor could they have been able to curb the insurgency in the area of their deployment.

The United States, which has provided around $ 10 billion (US) in military expenses and economic aid to Pakistan over the last eight years, has started carrying out aerial strikes through unmanned aircraft - Predator.

It targeted several Taliban and Al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Waziristan, Bajaur, Khyber, Mohmand, Orakzai in the tribal areas, and Bannu district in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan after the government fell short of meeting the world community’s requirements to ‘do more’ to help the west achieve its military designs in Afghanistan.

As a result of the stepped up American aerial strikes, the country has been experiencing an internal backlash. The series of attacks has brought it to the brink of a civil war. In reaction to the Predators’ attacks the Pakistani offshoot of Afghanistan’s Taliban has intensified terrorist activities – inside Pakistan - exposing the fragility of its security fabric.

During the past two years, the Taliban have carried out acts of violence with impunity in areas of its choosing, bringing the war out of the under-developed tribal regions into Pakistan’s most modern urban centers of Islamabad and Lahore – the country’s federal and cultural capitals, respectively. The targets for terrorists are as varied as religious minorities, army regulars, and members of the civilian security forces. Hundreds of the buildings of girls’ schools in the north of the country have been blown up during the past two years. Similarly, owners of video and barber shops are also on top of the Taliban’s list of potential targets, as the organization considers watching movies and listening to music, and shaving beards to be against Islam – a stand not supported by many religious scholars of the country.

Four suicide bomb attacks in a span of just eleven days, from March 25 to April 4, joined a long list of such horrendous acts of violence that have shattered the civic life and national economy during the past two years. Over one hundred people died and many more were hospitalized in these four suicide bombings. Among places targeted are a mosque in the tribal areas close to the country’s border with Afghanistan, a Shia place of worship in an urban center close to the country’s capital, a restaurant in a semi-tribal area in the country’s north, and a paramilitary post in the capital Islamabad.

An fierce and cruelly daring armed attack on a police training school close to the mega city Lahore, in which eight policemen were killed and three attackers blew themselves up, as well as the ransacking and looting of equipment from a government radio station in restive Waziristan region are just the latest in the suicide bombings scourge.

Growing chaos inside Pakistan is also a source of significant concern for the international community since Pakistan is the only Muslim country with nuclear weapons, is being perceived as a threat to the world peace.

In view of the current chaotic situation in Pakistan, Western capitals have started linking achievement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s objectives – military and social development in Afghanistan – with the achievement of stability in Pakistan.

US President Barak Obama has branded Al-Qaeda a “cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within,” calling the extremists responsible for thousands of deaths in Pakistan.

Under its recently announced new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, the US administration has planned to order a 60 percent increase in US military expenses in Afghanistan from the current expenditure of about $ 2 billion (US) a month. Washington also intends to send 17,000 combat troops and 4,000 more to serve as trainers and advisers to help double the Afghan army in next two years. The reinforcements would add to a force of some 65,000 foreign troops under the NATO command – considered too little to win war against the rag-tag Taliban force in Afghanistan.

President Obama, who has sought to triple US economic aid to Pakistan under the new strategy, acknowledges that, “A campaign against extremism will not succeed with bullets or bombs alone.” His promise to provide “the tools, training and support to the Pakistani security forces to help them root out the terrorists,” comes with a veiled warning: “this offer is not unconditional as after years of mixed results, the US does not want to provide a blank cheque, any more.”

Many among the US experts think that the mantra in Washington, for the next 12 months, is going to be a resource driven strategy in which success in Pakistan would be as vital as achieving the desired results in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has fallen victim to the growing wave of organized violence within its borders from its 1980s’ position of perpetrating a guerilla resistance – in line with its elite Inter Services Intelligence agency’s policy of causing a death by thousand cuts to the Bear – in Afghanistan. During the Cold War, the ISI worked with the Central Intelligence Agency to arm Islamist groups to fight Soviet forces in Afghanistan, setting the momentum for the Islamic resurgence movements in different parts of the world.

According to Samuel P. Huntington, the author of The Clash of Civilizations and the remaking of World Order, Pakistan “purposefully directed 75 per cent of the funds to the more fundamentalist Islamist groups with 50 per cent of the total going to the most extremist Sunni fundamentalist faction led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.”

“What the West sees as a victory for the Free World, Muslims see as a victory for Islam,” writes Huntington.

Some 160,000 ethnic Pushtuns from Afghanistan and Pakistan, in addition to thousands of volunteers from other Islamic countries, primarily Arab countries, who were trained by ISI in the guerilla warfare, brought the invading Soviet forces to their knees by conducting brisk hit and run operations.

Western governments moved away from Afghanistan after accomplishing their strategic objective: causing defeat to the Soviet Union and the demise of the communism. Nonetheless, Pakistan kept pursuing its objective of establishing a fundamentalist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar led government in Afghanistan, making some Western diplomats predict as far back as in 1999 what is happening today.

“There appears to be a pervasive and dangerous interplay between the politics of Pakistan and the turmoil inside Afghanistan. With the emergence of the Taliban there is growing reason to fear that militant extremism, obscurantism and sectarianism will infect surrounding countries. None of those countries has more to lose than Pakistan if ‘Talibanization’ were to spread further,” said then US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott in January 1999.

Pakistan’s chances to defeat militancy depend on, none other, but to its own resolve. Causing death to the Bear by a thousand cuts, it helped the Free World accomplish what the capitalists could not see happening in a prolonged Cold War.

Now, the tide has posed a threat to Pakistan’s own existence. In a direct challenge, Obama said Pakistan must show its commitment to hunt down the extremists within its own borders. Pakistan is once more required to grab the bull by the horns, not for others, but for its own self.