Pakistan: Now or Never?

The “sound and fury” of U.S.-Pakistan ties

With the release of CIA contractor Raymond Davis, the United States and Pakistan have put behind them one of the more public rows of their up-and-down relationship.  It was probably not the worst row — remember the furore over a raid by U.S. ground troops in Angor Adda in Waziristan in 2008, itself preceded  by a deluge of leaks to the U.S. media about the alleged duplicity of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency in its dealings on Afghanistan.

But it was certainly one which by its very nature was guaranteed to get the most attention – an American who shot dead two Pakistanis in what he said was an act of self-defence, denied diplomatic immunity and ultimately released only after the payment of blood money. Adding to the drama were two intelligence agencies battling behind the scenes.

It was also the first serious row since the Obama administration began to build what it promised would be a new strategic relationship with Pakistan.

As I wrote earlier this month, overall relations between the United States and Pakistan were rather better than they looked (or at least than they appeared at the height of the Davis row).  Compared to two years ago, Pakistan is more likely to talk now about the need for stability in Afghanistan than strategic depth (the extent of this shift is open to debate). The United States has also moved closer towards meeting Pakistan’s calls for a political settlement in Afghanistan by holding direct talks with representatives of the Taliban, according to several official sources with knowledge of those contacts.

On the subject of Taliban talks, the New York Times noted that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, during a speech to the Asia Society last month, “appeared to recast longstanding preconditions for talks: that the insurgents lay down their arms, accept the Afghan Constitution and separate from Al Qaeda. Instead, she described them as ‘necessary outcomes’. ”

According to the NYT, “officially, the State Department played down the change in language, but a senior Western diplomat in Washington, who was familiar with the strategy behind Mrs. Clinton’s speech, said: ‘It was not intentional to explicitly make preconditions into outcomes. But the text now leaves room for interpretation, which opens doors.’”

The other half of that story is to look at who first suggested that the United States focus on outcomes rather than preconditions for talks  – Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani, who wrote a detailed letter to President Barack Obama last year outlining how he saw the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Pakistan’s political crisis

Never in the history of Pakistan has a democratically elected civilian government served out its full term and then been replaced by another one, also through democratic elections. It is that context that makes the latest political crisis in Pakistan so important.

Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani is scrambling to save his PPP-led government after it lost its parliamentary majority when its coalition partner, the  Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), announced it would go into opposition.  A smaller religious party, the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F), already quit the coalition last month.  If the government falls and elections are held ahead of schedule in 2013, the opportunity for Pakistan to have a government which serves its full term will be lost. 

The prevailing view among political analysts appears to be that the government is now less likely to last until 2013, even if it manages to survive in the short term. But given the peculiar nature of Pakistani politics, where the military exerts a powerful role behind the scenes, no one is predicting anything with any certainty.

The main opposition leader, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, has shown little enthusiasm for forcing an early election which could propel his Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) into power at a time when the country faces huge economic and security problems. Better to wait it out until an election in 2013 that his PML-N is seen as likely to win. Having been ousted in a coup in 1999, Sharif also remains deeply suspicious of the army, and he has ruled out supporting any moves against the government that might be orchestrated by the military. Giving democracy time to bed down, by allowing the government led by the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) to serve its full term, could set a useful precedent for a future PML-N administration. 

The army itself has shown no inclination to run the country directly, and it already controls the issues that matter most to it – foreign and security policy.  It has barely disguised its frustration with Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari — who also leads the PPP — particularly after he travelled to France and Britain last summer while the country suffered from devastating floods.  But that does not translate into wanting to see Sharif back in power. According to a U.S. embassy cable released by WikiLeaks,  army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani made it clear to U.S. officials that “regardless of how much he disliked Zardari, he distrusted Nawaz (Sharif) even more”.

Another option, possibly more palatable to the army, would be an alternative coalition of smaller political parties which might be able to challenge both Zardari and Sharif in the next election. But that will take time to fall into place, possibly right up to 2013, if at all.  Don’t rule anybody out, however unlikely they seem now, as part of an alternative coalition. That includes former military ruler Pervez Musharraf, who set his sights very firmly on 2013 when he launched his political party in London in October.

A couple of final points. We don’t actually know for sure whether there is a groundswell of popular support in favour of ditching the current government, though there is, as Nadeem Paracha argued in Dawn,  a great deal of populist sloganeering on television channels about the state of the country.  “Akin to a black comedy is the fact that most TV anchors and hosts that go on spouting all these concerns – unemployment, inflation, drone attacks, ‘good governance’, Aafia ki wapsi (jailed Pakistani scientist Aafia Siddiqui)  etc. – are sitting pretty with hefty salaries and perks, and, what some would suggest, an agenda to safeguard the interests of some of the most anti-democracy classes in this country i.e., the military, the mullah and large sections of the upper and middle-classes.”

Pakistan:the unintended consequences of U.S. pressure

U.S. pressure on Pakistan has always led to deep resentment within the Pakistan Army, which has taken heavy casualties of its own fighting Pakistani Taliban militants on its side of the border with Afghanistan. But there are signs that this resentment is now spiralling in dangerously unpredictable ways.

The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency has denied  it was responsible for revealing the name of a senior Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official in Pakistan, forcing him to flee the country after threats to his life. But the suspicion lingers that the ISI, which falls under the control of the Pakistan Army, is flexing its muscles in response to U.S. pressure.

In an article for Time magazine, former CIA officer Robert Baer said that even if you accepted the ISI denial, “what can’t be dismissed is a lawsuit filed by a Pakistani tribesman in which he accuses the CIA of murdering his brother and his son in a drone attack. According to press reports, none of which have been confirmed by the CIA, it was the appearance of the station chief’s name in a filing in this suit, along with unspecified threats, that caused him to be pulled. Regardless, the suit itself could be an ominous sign that the Pakistanis may be coming to the end of their rope in the ‘war on terror’.”

His assumption was that the ISI, which until now is believed to have given tacit support to the U.S. drone strikes, had supported the case by the Pakistani tribesman.

Even more alarming are Pakistani press reports suggesting that fake WikiLeaks cables planted in the Pakistan media were deliberately designed by Pakistani intelligence to whip up public opinion against U.S. pressure to “do more”. (h/t Five Rupees).

“The fake story is not an isolated incident,” Azhar Abbas, the managing director of GEO News, wrote. “Political and security observers believe a concerted effort is once again being made to encourage and promote a typical extremist mindset. Some analysts-cum-anchors have re-emerged from quasi-oblivion. Many journalists and analysts are briefed and encouraged to take an aggressively anti-West, especially anti-US, stance. Experts, who ‘preach’ extremism in disguise, are encouraged to participate in talk shows.”

Maintaining the support of the Pakistani people has been essential in Pakistan’s own battle against the Pakistani Taliban - a widely circulated video of a girl being flogged in the Swat valley rallied public opinion behind the army when it launched a military operation there last year to drive out militants from the region.  The authenticity of that video is a subject of much debate in Pakistan. But be that as it may, if public opinion were to turn decisively against military operations, no amount of American pressure would be able to convince the Pakistan Army to launch a new ground assault to assert control of areas now held by militants, including North Waziristan.

Between golf and war, Pakistan’s General Kayani’s future is debated

The Pakistan Army prides itself on being an institution which rises above politics and personal ambition, committed to defend the interests of the nation. That this has not always been the case is demonstrated by its history of military coups, and a tendency of past military rulers, from General Zia ul-Haq to former president Pervez Musharraf, to impose a very personal brand of leadership.  Where Zia pushed Pakistan towards hardline Islam, Musharraf aimed at “enlightened moderation” in a country he wanted modelled more on Turkey than on Saudi Arabia.

While no one expects the military to launch another coup, some of that historical memory is feeding into increasingly intense speculation about the future of Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who is due to retire in November.

The general who is arguably Pakistan’s most powerful man has given few clues as to whether he might seek an extension in office beyond November.  But earlier this week Pakistani paper The News reported that the army’s corps commanders wanted him to stay on to see through the battle against Islamist militants in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. One theory doing the rounds is that Kayani could be appointed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, with oversight over the air force and navy as well as the army,  and with the role given enhanced powers to ensure he remains in command.

Kayani has been credited with restoring the army’s image in Pakistan - it had suffered from the popular resentment against Musharraf, who stepped down in 2008 . He has also made it clear the military had no intention of taking over the country, although it continues to call the shots on foreign and security policy.  He has overseen some successful operations in the tribal areas and built a reasonable working relationship with the Americans.

A former head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, Kayani never gives public interviews and therefore remains somewhat inscrutable for those trying to gauge his attitude to the United States or Pakistan’s traditional enemy India.  That said, he has always made his views clear when it seemed that either the United States or the civilian government were about to over-step the boundary into what the Pakistan Army considers its own domain.  A suggestion floated by President Asif Ali Zardari in 2008 that Pakistan adopt a policy of no first use of nuclear weapons was quickly dropped after raising hackles in the army which determinedly guards its control of the nuclear arsenal. 

Kayani spoke out fiercely against a reported incursion by U.S. ground troops in 2008 and in 2009 condemned provisions in the Kerry-Lugar U.S. aid package which called for greater civilian oversight of military appointments and promotions.

The civilian government has given mixed messages about whether it wants Kayani to stay on, but is seen as unlikely to challenge the military or the United States if either or both of them decide they need to keep him in command. In any case, after a rocky start, the civilian government and the military appear to have found – for now at least – an accommodation with each other in which the government relies on the army to fight the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas and knows better than to cross its red lines when it comes to foreign and security policy.

from Afghan Journal:

Bombing your own people: the use of air power in South Asia

(U.S. Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt jets, also known as the Warthog. File photo)

Pakistani army chief of staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani offered a rare apology at the weekend for a deadly air strike in the Khyber region in the northwest  in which residents and local officials say at least 63 civilians were killed.

Tragically for the Pakistani military, most of the victims were members of a tribe that had stood up against the Taliban. Some of them were members of the army. Indeed as Dawn reported the first bomb was dropped on the house of a serving army officer, followed by another more devastating strike just when people rushed to the scene. Such actions defy description and an explanation is in order from those who ordered the assault, the newspaper said in an angry editorial.

But the question really is wasn't it coming? The counter-insurgency strategy that Pakistan has pursued to wrest control of its turbulent northwest along the border with Afghanistan has consisted of heavy use of air strikes and long range artillery barrages in the initial stages before putting boots on the ground.

It's the steam-roller approach that Lord Curzon, the turn-of-the century British Viceroy of India, spoke about when confronted with a similar challenge in Waziristan - except that it relies on stand-off weapons like releasing bombs from the safety of a jet aircraft to keep military casualties down, taking a leaf from the U.S. playbook in Afghanistan.

Indeed it would appear that while the U.S. is trying to change tack after years of  deadly strikes in Afghanistan, and focus on avoiding casualties at all costs, the Pakistanis are relying on the classic counter-insurgency strategy of overwhelming force as Tim Foxley writes on the Afghanistan blog or the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

General Kayani in Washington; Pakistan’s most powerful man

So much for democracy. When Pakistan holds a “strategic dialogue” with the United States in Washington this week, there is little doubt that the leading player in the Pakistani delegation will be its army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani.

We have got so used to Americans dealing with the Pakistan Army in their efforts to end the stalemate in Afghanistan that it does not seem that surprising that the meeting between the United States and Pakistan would be dominated by the military. Nor indeed that Dawn columnist Ardeshir Cowasjee would describe Kayani as the most powerful man in Pakistan. Even the grudging admiration granted in this Times of India profile of Kayani by Indrani Baghchi is in keeping with the current mood.

But before taking it for granted that this is a normal state of affairs, do pause to consider how it might seem if Britain, for example, which has worked closely with the United States on both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, sent a delegation to Washington in which the army chief was expected to call the shots. Also in the interests of keeping everyone honest, remember that it was not actually supposed to be this way.

The United States has always preferred to deal with military rulers in Pakistan, but the forced exit of former military ruler Pervez Musharraf in 2008 and the election of President Barack Obama had raised hopes Washington might be about to turn over a new leaf, with policies which encouraged the development of civilian democracy.  Its preference for military rulers in the past has been partially blamed for suppressing democracy in Pakistan (though others blame either the country’s own hapless politicians or the overweening nature of the army, depending on which side of the argument you sit).

So what happened to the change promised by Obama, which encouraged many Pakistanis to hope that for once Washington would “pour money into democracy as opposed to autocracy“?

Inside Pakistan itself, the political parties have been at loggerheads, leaving Kayani looking like the only national figure who remained above the fray.  In a sense he retained the army’s traditional “parental role”, ready to step in if the fighting between the rival politicians got out of hand. A bruising battle between President Asif Ali Zardari and the judiciary also limited the scope for the government to clip the wings of the powerful military.

Kayani, meanwhile, has both vowed to keep the army out of politics while retaining a tight grip on foreign and security policy. He spoke out fiercely against a reported incursion by U.S. ground troops in 2008 and in 2009 condemned provisions in the Kerry-Lugar U.S. aid package which called for greater civilian oversight of military appointments and promotions.

U.S. aid to Pakistan: the law of unintended consequences

U.S. plans to triple aid to Pakistan to $1.5 billion a year appear to have run rather quickly afoul of the law of unintended consequences – by threatening to create tensions between the government and the army.

The Kerry-Lugar aid bill is meant to bolster Pakistan’s civilian democracy and help the country fight Islamist militants.  But it also stipulates that U.S. military aid will cease if Pakistan does not help fight the militants; seeks Pakistani cooperation on nuclear non-proliferation and provides for an assessment of how effective the civilian government’s control is over the military.

The aid conditions have already been criticised by Pakistan’s opposition parties, and in an unusually public statement, the Pakistan Army added its note of disapproval about what is being seen as unwarranted interference in Pakistan’s internal affairs.

During a meeting of his top commanders, Pakistan Army chief General Pervez Ashfaq Kayani noted that ”Pakistan is a sovereign state and has all the rights to analyse and respond to the threat in accordance with her own national interests”, according to the statement.

“Kerry-Lugar bill also came under discussion during the conference,” it said. “The forum expressed serious concern regarding clauses impacting on national security. A formal input is being provided to the government. However, in the considered view of the forum, it is the parliament, that represents the will of the people of Pakistan, which would deliberate on the issue, enabling the government to develop a national response.”

In an editorial, Dawn newspaper cautioned that the row over the Kerry-Lugar bill “is inching worryingly towards becoming a debate about ‘national security’ versus democracy”.

“Right or wrong, wise or unwise, the bill must not become the basis for fresh cleavages between the army and the political opposition on one side and the government on the other,” it said. “The national security–democracy debate is not an either/or issue — national security can and must be protected through the democratic process. Even by Pakistani standards, it is too soon to forget the damage caused by extra-constitutional interventions.”

Finding space for progress between India and Pakistan

With the foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan likely to meet on the sidelines of a summit in Egypt this month, to be followed up by talks between the two countries’ leaders, newspapers on both sides of the border are exploring the space for progress in a peace process broken off by New Delhi after last November’s attacks on Mumbai.

The Hindu says that officials in both New Delhi and Islamabad are working to prepare the ground for the meetings – expected to take place on the sidelines of a summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Sharm el-Sheikh – so that at least some progress can be made. 

“Having scaled back its initial demands for the dismantling of terrorist infrastructure as a precondition for the resumption of dialogue, India now wants evidence of Pakistan’s professed commitment to stop terrorists from staging cross-border strikes,” writes Siddharth Varadarajan in the Hindu.

He says India aims to “get Islamabad to recognise that New Delhi is serious about benchmarking the progress made against anti-India terror groups and linking that to the pace and scope of future dialogue. Thus, India would like to receive from Pakistan a detailed account of all the steps its investigative agencies have taken so far to identify and prosecute those involved in the Mumbai conspiracy case. Indian officials say they have heard about some of these steps ‘verbally’ or have seen reports in the press but would like to see things put down on paper.”

Writing in Dawn newspaper, Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar says a tentative agreement on Kashmir drawn up under former president Pervez Musharraf could be retrieved and pursued.

“New Delhi realises more than Islamabad that normalcy is not even thinkable without having Kashmir out of the way,” he writes. ”But that requires a proper atmosphere in India and it cannot be created without bringing the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack to justice.”

And he says a solution would be possible only if the Pakistan Army led by General Ashfaq Kayani were willing to support detente with India.  The meetings in Egypt ”can be successful only to the extent that Gen Kayani is willing to go. Can he look at Pakistan’s relations with India without bringing in the past? Normalcy between the two countries depends on that.”

The Pakistan Army and civilian democracy

The Pakistan Army has been getting a lot of flak over the past week or so for its alleged failure to take a tough line against Taliban militants expanding their reach across Pakistan’s north-west.  And although Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani issued a statement promising to fight the militants and security forces began a new offensive, doubts remain about the military’s willingness to take on Islamist groups that it once nurtured as part of its rivalry with India.

Among a spate of articles about Pakistan’s powerful military, Newsweek ran a piece headlined “Pakistan’s Self-Defeating Army”. It argued that far from serving as a bulwark against chaos, the military had helped destabilise Pakistan by undermining the development of a civilian democracy in the decades since the country was founded in 1947.

David Kilcullen, a counter-insurgency expert, called during a Congressional hearing for “fundamental, root and branch reform of the Pakistani military, and bringing it firmly under the authority of civilian elected officials”. Arguing that U.S. aid should be channelled into building up the police rather than the military, he said this ”would protect the Pakistani people, improve counterinsurgency performance, enhance the rule of law and weaken the stranglehold of the army over the civilian leadership of Pakistan.”

The arguments in favour of civilian democracy were well rehearsed when President Pervez Musharraf was forced out of office last year, and then endorsed by the administration of President Barack Obama. Kayani himself has so far stressed his commitment to civilian democracy. So to some extent the latest talk about the role of the Pakistan Army is a rehash of old news.

What I have not seen however, is a coherent and clear explanation of how the army is supposed to do more in fighting the Taliban, while also doing less by subsuming its power to that of the civilian government. Were the civilian government determined and united in fighting the Taliban, there would be no contradiction – in a constitutional democracy, the army is supposed to follow the orders of the political leadership. But there seems to be something of a suggestion creeping in that the army should be ready to take the initiative, with or without the backing of the government.

Reforming Pakistan’s security agencies

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has put out a paper on the need to reform Pakistan’s intelligence agencies just as army chief General Ashfaq Kayani is winning much praise for playing what is seen as a decisive role in defusing the country’s latest political crisis and saving democracy.

French scholar Frederic Grare says in the paper the reform and “depoliticisation” of the agencies, in particular the military’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), is imperative.

Grare says there is no magic formula to transform overnight an authoritarian regime into a full-fledged democracy but says there’s no excuse for the government to sit on its hands (“patience should not be an alibi for inaction”).

(more…)