From AfPak to PakAf ?

The phrase AfPak has been coined by the Obama administration less than one year ago. Before that, both countries were not that hyphenated. Afghanistan was the problem and Pakistan was a strategic ally of the West in the US-led global war on terror (One remembers the warm relations between G.W. Bush and General Musharraf). For the Obama administration, Pakistan is less part of the solution than part of the problem and the Afghan problem cannot be solved if the Pakistani problem is not solved at the same time or even before – hence this phrase, “AfPak”. Now, the situation in Pakistan is such that some senior leaders of the US administration are wondering whether the priority should not be Pakistan – hence a shift from AfPak to PakAf.

The political scenario that has unfolded itself in the last two years in Pakistan has relied on some very positive developments. In 2007, the judiciary, thanks to the action of really courageous judges has forced Musharraf to give up the uniform and then to step down and to organize elections. In February 2008 general elections have marked some transition to democracy. Three political parties, the PPP of Benazir Bhutto’s widow, Azif Zardari, the PML (N) of Nawaz Sharif and the Awami National Party of the Pashtun nationalists have formed a ruling coalition that has shown how determined the civilians were to work together in order to avoid the come back of the military rulers. Last but not least, the new Chief Of Army Staff, General Kayani was not interested in ruling the country and he even started to brief the civilians, as if he was accountable to them.

The good news stop there, unfortunately.

1/ The parties of the coalitions are not terribly legitimate in the eyes of the Pakistani citizens who, incidentally, have not been exerting their right to vote in large numbers for years. These parties are elite-oriented: they represent the landlords and the business milieu; they are dynastic and indulge in nepotism. The legitimacy of the president is especially doubtful. Zardari is notorious for many corruption charges which may bounce back now that the Supreme Court has struck down the amnesty law Zardari had obtained from Musharraf before he vacated power.

2/ The current “transition to democracy” is as unachieved as the one that Pakistan tried in the late 1980s. The army is still in charge of most of the strategic policies: the Afghan policy, the Kashmir policy, the nuclear policy, to such an extent that the Chinese leaders are not talking to the civilian leaders so much, but to the generals. Secondly, Kayani resisted the attempt by the President and the Prime Minister to regain the upper hand on the ISI (the Inter Services Intelligence, which remain a major actor).

3/ Now, the army and the military are not precisely reliable allies in the fight against the islamist groups. The army has promoted or protected islamist groups during the war against the Soviet in Afghanistan and then the Talibans. It has supported the jihadist groups which were active in Kashmir and who could not bleed India, not only in Kashmir but also elsewhere in India. After 9/11, the Pakistani army officially severed its links with these groups but in fact the only movements that have been targeted – and not in a very systematic manner – have been the sectarian groups (Sunnis or Shias which were accused of dividing the Muslims).

As a result of this policy, the Pakistani army, directly or indirectly, is responsible for three major challenges:

A. The rise of militancy in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and especially in North and South Waziristan where Al Qaeda and the Talibans have taken refuge: hese areas have never been ruled by the state (not even during the British period) but by Tribal leaders. They are the places where Talibans and Al Qaeda people (including many Uzbeks have found refuge after the 2001 NATO offensive in Afghanistan). It seems that most of the terrorist plots that have been targeting the West over the last few years have their origin in this Tribal area – at least the people who had been arrested had often gone there for some training. Some of these places have become “states within the states” where islamist groups from different origins (including Punjabis) worked together and established training camps – from where so many suicide bombers have operated. The US have started to rather massively use drones to target these groups in Sept. 2008 and the Obama administration has continued to do so. In August, the leader of the Pakistani Talibans, Beithulla Mehsud, has been killed that way. But this is not the solution for two reasons: the number of innocent casualties is not acceptable and generates more militants and this strategy of targeting killings cannot eradicate the militant movements. The US, therefore, have asked the Pakistanis to deploy troops. They’ve done it four times. The first three times, their operations were short-lived: the terrain is difficult, the Pakistani army is not trained for this kind of war (it is trained to fight the India army) and the enemies are ferocious – so the army preferred to strike deals with the tribal leaders: they were allowed to implement the Shariat and to run they mini-states, but they were asked to contain the militants. This is the deal the government of Pakistan decided to make also with the Talibans in the Swat Valley last spring. But then the US put pressure on the Pakistanis and they have deployed the army. They are doing the same thing for the fourth time in South Waziristan. This operation is an important test: the Pakistani army has deployed 28 000 soldiers against about 12000 militants (it may not be sufficient – the ratio was much more in Iraq or for that matter in Punjab where the fight against the Khalistanis mobilized large battalions). Secondly, the Pakistani army has resisted the US pressures for so long that they may have to stop in less than one month now: such operations need to be sustained for months – if not years (look at the years of guerilla war between the Khalistanis and the Indian army in the 1980s-1990s).. Last but not least, the army has selected one place only, South Waziristan, which means two things: the militants may take refuge in North Waziristan (“don’t disperse, destroy!” had said Holebrooke…) and the army has decided to spare an important group, the Haqqani network which is notorious for its actions against the Indians in Afghanistan (with the blessing of the ISI…)

This is one of the reasons why the South Waziristan operation may be a smoke screen:
  The Pakistani army wants to spare groups which will keep India at bay in Afghanistan: the fear to be encircled is a very common syndrome among the army officers. India is still looked at as THE public enemy number one, not the Talibans who had helped Pakistan to make Afghanistan an ally and given the army some strategic depth.
  The Pakistani army does not want to alienate the groups which will be back to power when the NATO troops will go. And the more we talk about withdrawing from Afghanistan, the more the Pakistanis are preparing the post-Karzai Afghanistan of their dreams.

We’ll know very soon whether the Pakistani army is serious about South Waziristan. We do not know yet whether it has been serious about the Swat Valley – where, incidentally, the brutality of the soldiers vis-à-vis the local people, who have been displaced in thousands is worrying (all the more so as the Islamist groups are among the NGOs which help them the most effectively).

B. The state is losing ground elsewhere too: in Islamabad and in Punjab.

The Pashtun area is not the only one that is badly affected by the rise of islamist militancy, even though Peshawar is still more targeted than any other Pakistani city (see the last bomb blast that killed 114 people on a market the day Hillary Clinton arrived in Pakistan in October last). Islamabad has been targeted as never before:
  On 6th of October, suicide bomber killed 5 people of the UN World Food Program
  6 days later, militants stormed the Pakistani Army headquarters and held dozens of hostages for more than 20 hours. In all 16 people were killed including 8 soldiers and among them two senior officers.
  On the 23rd of Oct. a brigadier was killed in his car by a pair of gunmen on a motorbike. This tactic of targeted killings of army officers was tried again last week on the 7th of nov. unsuccessfully this time. These attacks in Islamabad were and are still intended to dissuade the army to launch the South Waziristan operation. Indeed, this operation may lose some of the popular support it had in the society if life is disrupted for too long: not only you can’t move any more in Islamabad (because of check points – and fear), but schools have remained closed after one the Islamabad schools was targeted too.

What these attacks suggest is that the army is much more vulnerable than we thought. After one of these attacks, the Interior Minister, Rehman Malik said that those who were responsible for this wanted to see “Pakistan as a failed state” (New York Times, 16 Oct. 2009, p. A 12). The fear that Pakistan becomes a failed state is all the more pervasive as the army seems unable to protect its headquarter AND is probably infiltrated by islamists. Indeed, the leader of the commando which stormed the army headqurter, Muhammed Aqeel, alias Dr. Usman, was a former army man – he worked in the Army Medical Corps. After leaving the army, he became a full time militant of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, one of the most active islamist movements in Punjab.

And this is the other challenge Pakistan has to deal with: out of the Pashtun area, not only Islamabad, but also Punjab has become a problematic place.
  Most of the recent attacks have taken place in Punjab: six months ago, the cricket team of Sri Lanka had been targeted in Lahore, last month, in Lahore, two police training centres and a federal investigations building have been targeted by militants who killed 19 policemen.
  Obviously, the aim is to destabilize Punjab because if you want to destabilize Pakistan, you need to destabilize Punjab. These attacks in Punjab may be conceived in the Tribal belt, but they rely on the active mobilization of Punjabi militants.

South Punjab, especially, is on the verge of a talibanisation process according to specialists of this area, such as Ayesha Siddiqa. Why? Because the local islamists are getting closer to the Talibans and Al Qaeda.
  Who are the local islamists? The sectarian groups and the jihadists. . The sectarian groups are the Sunni militants who are targeting the Shia for years – with the support of the state, at least since Zia started an islamisation policy that was in fact a sunnisation policy. . The jihadists are these groups which have been active in Kashmir for decades: Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, again with the support of the army and the ISI because they were bleeding India. . Officially, these groups have been banned in 2002. But they are still recruiting foot soldiers and their leaders are still delivering inflammatory speeches. . South Punjab is a good recruiting ground because this part of the province is especially poor and feudal. The L-e-T is especially good at offering decent living conditions to youngsters who are jobless and hopeless

C. The security issue

It is a twofold issue: it has to do with the spread of terrorism in South Asia and with the nuclear problem. India has been more targeted than any other country of the region by Pakistani islamist groups. Exactly one year ago, the Mumbai attacks killed more than 170 people. The Pakistani government itself has admitted that Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Punjab based movement, was involved. But many other attacks have taken place in the last 10 years, including that of the Indian Parliament in December 2001.

In fact, India is the fourth most affected country when you look at terrorist violence after Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. One more Bombay would have huge repercussions.

So far as the nuclear question is concerned, experts keep telling us that the nuclear war heads are safe. Pakistan has about 80 to 100 war heads. But the risk exists that army men adopted a more aggressive agenda, be they supporting the islamist cause or not. The risks of nuclear weapons going out of control is not there in Afghanistan.

If a shift from AfPak to PakAf seems to be needed, the policies to be implemented are not easy to identify. The US have already decided to help Pakistan to rebuild itself. This is precisely what the Kerry-Lugar Bill is intended to do: it provides 7.5 billion dollars for development, education and job creations over the coming 5 years. This is a state-building programme whoseaim is to (re)build a civil society that has been always weak.

The problem is that the Pakistani elite may not be willing to play that game for three reasons: 1) For the army, the conditionalities are unacceptable: they imply that the civilians are really controlling the military affairs, including the promotions of officers, 2) For the politicians, the building of a vibrant civil society means that the interests they represent – the feudal landlords and the businessmen – will be in jeopardy, 3) But, more generally speaking the very fact that this money comes from the US is problematic for most of the Pakistanis. America is supposed to be responsible for most of the countries problem, including the unleashing of terrorism, the sequel of the Afghan war that is not a war Pakistan wants to be part of. AND Washington is supposed to erode the country’s sovereignty to such an extent that Pakistan may not be able to resist India’s attacks. The Indo-American rapprochement today makes these two countries strategic partners and Pakistan feels left out and betrayed, like in the 1980s.

If the American money could be spent by multilateral agencies, it would make things much easier, but the Kerry-Lugar Bill suggests that, in fact, we have already started to shift from AfPak to PakAf.