The restoration of a democratic civilian regime in Pakistan under President Asif Ali Zardari in 2007 raised grand hopes of a real convergence of interests. Surely, a democratic Pakistan would be more prone to working closely with the United States to eviscerate al-Qaeda and to terminate the Taliban? Sadly, such hopes have died yet again.
The military apparatus under the aegis of General Pervez Ashfaq Kiyani has quickly asserted itself. For example, in late 2009, the military stripped Zardari of his power to control Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. More recently, Kiyani has indicated he has little interest in going after the Haqqani faction of the Taliban which is wreaking havoc on US forces in Afghanistan using Pakistan’s western borderlands as sanctuaries. Indeed during Gates’ visit to Pakistan last week, he was even told that the Pakistani military had no plans to continue its military campaign beyond current operations in Swat and Waziristan. Such unwillingness to expand the scope of military operations could well undercut the significance of the augmented US military forces in Afghanistan. Worse still, now the Pakistani military is offering to serve as an honest broker with the Taliban in return for US pressure on India to reduce its footprint in Afghanistan.
The continuing solicitousness toward the Pakistani military even in the face of growing evidence of divergent interests and contrary actions stems almost entirely from a pervasive and flawed belief in the Pentagon: namely, that the United States simply has no alternative means other than the use of Pakistani territory to supply the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. This assumption is only notionally correct. Pakistan, which extracts substantial rents for each truck that passes through its territory, could ill-afford to lose those funds. Yet the Pentagon simply cannot bring itself to call Pakistan’s bluff.
Sadly, the unwillingness of key entities within the US government to re-examine the basic premises of its relationship with Pakistan has only fitfully advanced US interests in the region. The propensity to overlook and rationalize the myriad shortcomings of the military establishment has cost the United States much treasure and some blood in the region. As such, it is time US policymakers accept the country’s security and Pakistani military interests are not in alignment, unlikely to miraculously converge. In the absence of this fundamental re-appraisal of interests, the United States will continue to pay a high price for its involvement in the region and find its strategic goals remain elusive.
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Riaz Missen
“The latest statement by US Defence Secretary Robert Gates exhorting India, Pakistan and Afghanistan to come together to defeat the menace of Islamist terror in South Asia, has again underscored the fundamental delusion held by the United States about the interests and goals of the Pakistani state and its dominant component, the military apparatus.”
Ganguly Sahib, it is true that Pakistan built an ideological infrastructure during the Cold War era to sustain a jihad industry, under ’strategic’ compulsion. You see, the Himalayan watershed is in the control of India and three rivers stopped from feeding its lands, Pakistan has to look around, mostly to America, for patronage. Pakistani government has the earnest desire to undo the ideological infrastructure that rests on the shoulder of ‘Deobandi’ and ‘Wahabi’ Islam. I think America should include in the list of the countries it wants to bring closer for peace in Afghanistan, its another frined, Saudi Arabia, as well.