Pakistan: Now or Never?

She came, she saw, she confounded: Clinton in Pakistan

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recently concluded visit to Pakistan has left us none the wiser about how the United States and its allies will end the  Afghan war. In her public comments, she spoke of action ”over the next days and weeks – not months and years, but days and weeks”.  She promised the United States would tackle Taliban militants in eastern Afghanistan in response to a long-standing Pakistani complaint that Washington had neglected the region when  it decided to concentrate its forces in population centres in southern Afghanistan in 2010 (remember “government in a box”?).

She called, in return, for cooperation on the Pakistani side of the border to ”squeeze these terrorists so that they cannot attack and kill any Pakistani, any Afghan, any American, or anyone.”  Between the two countries, they would tackle the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Pakistani Taliban.

But squeeze them to what end?  To weaken all but the hard-core leadership of the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network so that they agree to lay down arms and rejoin the political process in Afghanistan? Or to entice them into serious negotiations through which they might be offered a share of power in Kabul, or accommodated in a “soft partition” of Afghanistan (an idea deeply unpopular among Afghans) which leaves them in control of the south and the east?

As Pakistani columnist Ejaz Haider wrote in Pakistan Today just before Clinton arrived, the current U.S. policy looks a bit like the dialogue between Alice and the Cheshire Cat. “‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’ asked Alice. ‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat. ‘I don’t much care where—’ said Alice. ‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.”

True, Clinton stressed the need for a peace process to reach a political settlement in Afghanistan.  But that idea has been on the diplomatic agenda  for nearly two years. By the second half of last year, we were hearing that the United States had endorsed talkswith all of Afghanistan’s main insurgent groups, including the Haqqani network. By January this year, western countries said there would be no preconditions set for insurgents entering peace talks – only end-conditions that they sever ties with al Qaeda, renounce violence and agree to respect the Afghan constitution. In February, Clinton stressed the need for negotiations in a landmark speech to the Asia Society which coincided with reports the United States had begun direct talks with the Taliban.

In other words, we have heard a lot about talk about talks without any explanation as to why these have achieved so little so far (some blame U.S. military strategy, others Pakistani interference, others Taliban intransigence, others poor Afghan governance).   And the danger is that as long as these talks about talks continue without  yielding results, all parties to the Afghan conflict arm themselves up in readiness for an escalating civil war.

True,  Clinton admitted in public during her visit to Islamabad that the United States had held a preliminary meeting with representatives of the Haqqani network. But we already knew that.    According to The Washington Post, U.S. officials met Ibrahim Haqqani, the brother of the group’s patriarch, Jalaluddin Haqqani, in a Gulf kingdom in August. The meeting was arranged by the head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, who also attended, it reported.

Trusting the masses: US tiptoes into democracy in Pakistan

In his book “Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Imagination“, an edited collection of his Chapati Mystery blog, historian Manan Ahmed complained about the United States’ past support for former president Pervez Musharraf, and its refusal, at the time to trust Pakistan with democracy.  In an entry written in 2007, he described Pakistan as the “the not yet nation” - a country for which democracy might be a good thing in the long run, but  was in American eyes not yet ready.

“We fear the multitudes on two fronts. One is that we conceive of them as masses without politics – forever hostage to gross religious and ideological provocations. Masses which do not constitute a body politic or act with an interest in self-preservation or self-growth. Faced with that absence of reason, we are forced to support native royals to do the job (from Egypt to Pakistan). We justify it by stressing that we may not like these dictators but we know that if we did not have them, the masses would instantly betray us to the very forces of extremism that we seek to destroy,” he wrote.

“Second is that these masses are Muslim. This fear grounded in our history can, at best, be understood as the fear of the “Other” and, at worst, as the Lewis/Huntington model of civilizational clash. Either case, it is borne out of our inherent belief in ‘difference’. They are not like us. They do not possess reason, etc.”

That U.S. attitude has been changing slowly over the past few years, underpinned by the Arab spring, and in the case of Pakistan, Washington’s increasingly difficult relationship with the Pakistan Army over its alleged support for, or tolerance of, Islamist militants based in Pakistan. 

Democracy has become the new mantra, expressed most recently by former White House adviser Bruce Riedel in an op-ed in the New York Times.

“America needs a new policy for dealing with Pakistan. First, we must recognize that the two countries’ strategic interests are in conflict, not harmony, and will remain that way as long as Pakistan’s army controls Pakistan’s strategic policies. We must contain the Pakistani Army’s ambitions until real civilian rule returns and Pakistanis set a new direction for their foreign policy,” he said.

Somewhat more diplomatically, President Barack Obama made a point of saying that the United States’ argument was  not with the people of Pakistan but with the army’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), agency.

from Afghan Journal:

The Taliban in Afghanistan’s once impregnable Panjshir Valley

Last month driving up Afghanistan's magnificent Panjshir valley, you couldn't help thinking if the resurgent Taliban would ever be able to break its defences, both natural and from the Tajik-dominated populace. With its jagged cliffs and plunging valleys, Panjshir has been largely out of bounds  for the  Taliban, whether during the civil war or in the past 10 years when it has expanded a deadly insurgency against western and Afghan forces across the country. But on Saturday, the insurgents struck, carrying out a suicide bombing at a provincial reconstruction team base housing U.S. and Afghan troops and officials.

They were halted outside the base, but according to the provincial deputy governor they succeeded in  killing two civilians and wounding two guards when they detonated their explosives. The Taliban claimed responsibility, saying the first suicide bombing in a decade was a message to Western forces that they were not secure anywhere in the country. They said the  bombers came from within Panjshir, which if true  would worry people even more  because that would suggest the penetration was deeper and there could be more attacks.

The Long War Journal's Bill Roggio wrote that the bombing was a propaganda coup for the Taliban. Panjshir is the home of the legendary Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Massoud who was assassinated by two days before the Sept 11, 2001 attacks. Under Massoud's leadership the Panjshir Valley held out against not only against the Taliban, but famously the Soviet before them.

All along the drive by the side of the rushing Panjshir river on way to Massoud's hilltop mausoleum, the relics of the war against the Russians have been preserved : rusted tanks on roadsides and an overturned  armoured personnel carrier in the river. There were giant Massoud posters everywhere and because it was the anniversary of his assassination at the hands of a pair of men who pretended to be journalists, the ceremonial gates to the valley were draped in black.

And yet there were concerns even then . Security was tight at each of the gates on the narrow and winding highway through the tall mountains, and the Afghan police who stood guard said if Panjshir had been spared the kind of attacks the Taliban had mounted in the rest of Afghanistan,  it wasn't for lack of trying . They had already carried out attacks in neighbouring Nuristan province and according to a local Afghan police commander responsible for security at one of the checkpoints, American helicopters had been spotted in the area a few days before the anniversary, firing rockets over a hilltop. It wasn't clear who they were targeting, the commander said.

Even the proud Panjshiris were worrying about the expanding Taliban influence, especially concerned at the time about government attempts to seek reconciliation with them.  One Afghan elder who lost his son in the war against Russians said his village was fully armed to fight  the Taliban.  There was no way they were going to accept the Taliban in the Panjshir, he told me.

We need to talk about the Haqqanis

In a question and answer session last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked about how the United States would balance its need to work with Pakistan while also putting it under pressure to end its alleged support for the Haqqani network.

Her answer, according to the State Department transcript, was to remind her audience that the United States had also played a role in creating the mujahideen to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

“Now, I also think it’s important to take a little historical review. If you go on YouTube, you can see Sirajuddin Haqqani with President Reagan at the White House, because during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the United States Government, through the CIA, funded jihadis, funded groups like the Haqqanis to cross the border or to, within Afghanistan, be part of the fight to drive the Soviets out and bring down the Soviet Union,” she says.

I have to assume she means Jalaluddin Haqqani, the elderly father who has since passed on much of the leadership of the Haqqani network to his son, Siraj. Yet here is the thing. I cannot find any evidence that Haqqani ever visited the White House. I have asked around among Afghanistan and Pakistan experts. I have skimmed through my copy of Charlie Wilson’s War.  I have asked on Twitter if anyone could show that Haqqani had ever visited the United States. 

And so far I have nothing.  I am not going to say definitively that Jalaluddin Haqqani never visited the United States – the little voice in my head that says people who live in glass houses should not throw stones stops me from doing that.  But my working assumption – until proved otherwise – is that Clinton was wrong.

So why does it matter? The United States and Saudi Arabia did fund the mujahideen in the 1980s and to some extent bear the responsibility for what is happening now.

It matters for three reasons. It matters because if we can’t get our historical facts right, policy decisions are being made based on very shaky foundations.  The nature of U.S.,  Saudi and Pakistani support for the jihad against the Soviets is still very much open to debate.