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.”

The Pakistan Army has made it clear it has no intention of taking over the country after former general and president Pervez Musharraf was forced to stand down earlier this year.  But in a country which has spent much of its life under military rule, any hint of political interference by the army tends to be seized upon in Pakistan.

The aid bill, championed by the government of President Asif Ali Zardari, has already been slammed by the main opposition party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif as a humiliation for Pakistan.

At a time when the United States is keen for Pakistan to unite to fight Islamist militants, the last thing it needs is for the country to be riven by arguments both between the political parties and between the government of Zardari and the army.

And the other unintended consequence has been to increase resentment against America for what is seen as unwarranted interference.

(Photos: burning the U.S. flag in Peshawar in a protest over the Kerry-Lugar bill; file photo of army chief General Ashfaq Kayani)

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.”

In Pakistan’s Daily Times, Delhi university professor Alok Rai aims for an even wider view. He condemns the two-nation theory which gave birth to India and Pakistan as being at the root of a “mutually destructive cycle” between the two countries. Usually ascribed to Pakistan founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah,  Rai acknowledges that the two-nation theory was first propounded by Hindu nationalist Savarkar. 

But he adds, that “this rejection of the two-nation theory is entirely consistent in my mind with accepting the present reality of two independent, sovereign states, India and Pakistan, which should have mature relations.”

Basing his column on an e-mail exchange with an unnamed Pakistani friend, he says that the two countries must put their dispute over Kashmir behind them, a dispute that he sees as pretext for a much bigger struggle for legitimacy by Pakistan, even if this means that Islamabad must relinquish its commitment to “free” Kashmir from Indian rule.

“But my Pakistani interlocutor assures me that it is the hour before dawn that is the darkest, that the present generation, even in Punjab, is ready to move out of this mutually destructive cycle and start a new chapter in the sad history of our sub-continent. I am writing this in the hope that he is right and I am wrong. Happy to be wrong.”

Do read the articles in full because they are full of ideas that cannot easily be summarised. What does appear to be clear is that after the bitterness created by Mumbai, the journalists quoted above are looking for a way forward, whether in seeking a practical, short-term approach to talks between India and Pakistan, or seeking an accommodation with history.

Finally, a must read is this op-ed in Dawn newspaper, in which Irfan Husain writes about the victims of the Mumbai attacks and calls for an unambiguous rejection of such acts of violence.

“While Muslims argue that Islam does not condone this kind of terrorism against unarmed, innocent civilians, most do not condemn it in clear, unequivocal terms. After agreeing that such acts are un-Islamic, there is all too often a lingering ‘Yes, but…’ hanging in the air,” he writes.

“It is this ambiguity that has given terror groups in Pakistan and elsewhere the space and legitimacy they need to operate. Now that Pakistanis have seen the true face of terrorism in Swat, and have begun to support the government in its drive to rid us of this cancer, the lesson needs to be reinforced … We need to hear ordinary people who survived or lost close relatives, and see their pain. We need to see the horrors inflicted in the name of Islam.

“Above all, we need to share the agony of our neighbours.”

(Reuters photos: The Taj Mahal; the attack on Mumbai; the Marriott in Islamabad)

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.

My impression, and readers will correct me if I am wrong, is that this suggestion crops up far more in the foreign media than in the Pakistani (English-language) press, which acknowledges the ambiguity of an army that is supposed to rescue Pakistan from the Taliban while also reducing its power.

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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”).

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In his book on the Pakistan Army, South Asia expert Stephen Cohen quotes a senior lieutenant-general as warning the late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto against using the military to control political opposition. “If you use a stick too often, the stick will take over,” Cohen quotes the general as saying. “This has always been the history of the stick.”

There’s no sign yet of the Pakistan Army reverting to its usual role of wielding the big stick. But with the police out in force to quell protests in Punjab over a Supreme Court ruling excluding former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz from office, the obvious question to ask is whether we are about to see a repeat of the old cycle in which security forces are called out to restore order and end up taking over altogether. Indeed, the Pakistan Army’s first involvement in politics is generally dated to the 1953 imposition of martial law in Lahore – where protests erupted on Thursday over the court ruling.  Sharif has blamed President Asif Ali Zardari, widower of the late Benazir Bhutto, for the ruling.

Historical parallels can, of course, be misleading.  Pakistan Army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, has made it clear he wants to keep the military out of politics. He is currently visiting the United States, where the administration of President Barack Obama has repeatedly stressed its commitment to civilian democracy in Pakistan.

And Zardari, who has imposed governor’s rule in Punjab to replace an administration run by Shabaz Sharif, may yet find an accommodation with the powerful Sharif brothers over the issues that divide them — the restoration of judges sacked by former president Pervez Musharraf along with Zardari’s retention of presidential powers he inherited when Musharraf quit last year. Or we might be set for a long period of political manoeuvring between Pakistan’s bickering politicians which drags on for weeks or months.

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There is a strange dichotomy in Delhi at the moment. If you read the headlines or watch the news on television, India and Pakistan appear headed for confrontation - what form, what shape is obviously hard to tell but the rhetoric is getting more and more menacing each day.

Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Kayani promised a matching response ‘within minutes” were the Indians to carry out precision strikes against camps of militants inside Pakistan, whom it blames for the Mumbai attacks.

And as if they were doing a dress rehearsal, Pakistan Air Force jets have been flying over Islamabad and Lahore for the past two days, prompting one blogger  to report that some people had called up media outlets asking if the Indian Air Force was on its way.

Indian army chief General Deepak Kapoor meanwhile went up to the freezing heights of Siachen, the world’s highest battlefield, to test operational preparedness.

And yet off the front pages, and on the street and in living rooms, it doesn’t seem like a nation preparing for war. Instead Delhi is in the full swing of the marriage season when the astrological stars are right and thousands upon thousands of young couples trailed by a veritable army of friends, families and neighbours get betrothed.

There are also the Christmas/New Year festivities where the conversation is not about the possibility of war but the economic meltdown that has spoiled everyone’s party, including India’s. To be sure, there is rage each time Mumbai is mentioned, and there are many who say “they will have to pay for this”. But war? No, that isn’t at the top of people’s minds yet.

So what’s really going on? Is the threat of a fourth India-Pakistan war real, not counting 1999 when India and Pakistan fought over the heights above Kargil on the Line of Control? Are the two countries inexorably moving toward conflict without their people realising it?

Or is this the Cold Start  doctrine  that strategists speak of, in which you don’t really mobilise troops and armour for weeks on a vast scale and then go to war like in ancient times, but instead go quickly into action from forward bases both in the air and on the ground for a short and sharp thrust ?  

Your guess is as good as mine, but in another two days it will be a month since the Mumbai attackers struck.  As far as India is concerned, that is time enough for Pakistan to have acted against the men and groups that it says are involved in attacks on India. Is there a clock ticking somewhere?

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In his new book about the Pakistan Army, “War, Coups and Terror”, Brian Cloughley recounts how the British general, the Duke of Wellington,  responded to democracy in his first cabinet meeting as prime minister: ”An extraordinary affair. I gave them their orders and they wanted to stay and discuss them.”

The story is told as part of an argument about why the Pakistan Army has never been particularly successful at running the country.

“All Pakistan’s army coups have been bloodless, successful and popular - but popular only for a while,” writes Cloughley. “The trouble is that military people are usually quite good at running large organisations, even civilian ones, but generally fail to understand politics and government, and the give-and-take so necessary in that esoteric world.”

That idea is very much in vogue in Pakistan. Former president Pervez Musharraf has been forced to resign by a new civilian government, and Pakistan Army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, has pledged to keep the military out of politics. 

But how long will this idea hold? In a country which has been ruled by the army for much of its life, the possibility of a military coup will always be higher than in a country where democratic institutions have had time to establish themselves over decades or over centuries. On top of this, the fledging civilian government ushered in by elections in February faces the multiple challenges of near-economic collapse, the possibility of having to adopt unpopular measures prescribed by the International Monetary Fund, Islamist militancy and frequent missile attacks delivered by U.S. drones inside Pakistani territory.

All that makes its democracy fragile, and Barack Obama’s presidential election victory all the more important for those who see it as a triumph of the democratic process over decades of institutionalised prejudice. (Most analysts, at least temporarily, have set aside their anxieties about Obama’s pre-election pledge to go after al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan.)

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Pakistan has replaced the head of its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency, following months of questions from the United States about its reliability in the battle against the Taliban and al Qaeda.  Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shujaa Pasha, formerly head of military operations, will replace Lieutenant-General Nadeem Taj.

The change was part of a major overhaul of the military leadership by Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani, who also replaced the head of the 10 Corps in Rawalpindi, the most powerful corps in the army.

So to what extent was the United States responsible for the move? Or how far was it Pakistan’s own attempt to shore up its security operations as it cracks down on Islamist militants, who according to U.S. military commander David Petraeus threaten Pakistan’s “very existence”?

Washington has long suspected elements within the ISI of passing sensitive information to the Taliban –with whom the spy agency worked closely before the 9/11 attacks on the United States — undermining its campaign in Afghanistan. India and Afghanistan also accused the ISI of involvement in the July bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul. Pakistan has denied the allegations.

The New York Times reported at the weekend that President Asif Ali Zardari had held an unpublicised meeting with Michael Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, during his visit to the United States last week, amid ongoing U.S. pressure about what it called “the double game played by Pakistan’s spy agency”.

But it also quoted Zardari as saying that: “The ISI will be handled, that is our problem.” He added that ”We don’t hunt with the hound and run with the hare, which is what (former president Pervez) Musharraf was doing,” and said that ”Anyone not conforming with my government’s policy will be thrown out.”

Besides asking how much the change of leadership at the ISI was dictated by Washington, the other question is how much the army and the government worked together on it.  

Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper said in carrying out the overhaul of the military leadership, General Kayani ”has put in place a new team to implement his vision for reviving the prestige of the armed forces and for enhancing the security of the state.” The army’s authority has been challenged by U.S. military incursions across Pakistan’s border, in what Pakistan sees as a violation of its sovereignty.

The News added however that the trend of the reshuffle demonstrated “full coordination between the civil and military leadership”.

While Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari is in the United States discussing U.S. military strikes across Pakistan’s border, army chief General Ashfaq Kayani is on a far less publicised trip to China to talk about defence cooperation. The timing may be coincidental, but the potential implications of the United States and China playing competing roles in Pakistan are huge.

Pakistan has always seen China as a much more reliable friend, while support from Washington has waxed and waned in line with U.S. interests (Islamabad has never quite forgiven the United States for using it to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and then dropping it when the Russians were driven out in 1989.) 

And nowadays the difference in the approaches of Pakistan’s two giant allies is even more striking.  While the United States and Pakistan argue about U.S. cross-border strikes, China has quietly reaffirmed its commitment to keeping Pakistan stable.

In a condolence message sent after this weekend’s Marriott Hotel bombing, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said, “As a good neighbour and all-time friend of Pakistan, China will always support the unremitting efforts made by the government and people of Pakistan to safeguard the country’s stability.”

Of course there is no reason to jump to the conclusion the United States and China will become outright rivals over Pakistan — both have a stake in Pakistan’s stability, and in the past both have managed to maintain close ties with Islamabad without tripping over each other. But the current scenario certainly increases the chances of friction.

Add to that the fact that the strategic picture in South Asia has changed dramatically under the Bush administration. The United States has rewritten its relationship with India — which was still seen as in the Soviet camp back in the days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan –turning it into a crucial ally in Asia and potential bulwark against Chinese influence. It sealed that transformation by reaching a deal with India effectively recognising it as a nuclear power, ignoring any misgivings in China (India’s nuclear weapons programme was developed as much, if not more, as a defence against China as against Pakistan.)

So it will be interesting to see what Kayani brings back from China and Zardari from the United States in the way of promises of support.  Will the United States and China be able to work together to pull Pakistan out of its current crisis? Or are they drifting into a situation where they end up opposing each other?

Just two days after a suicide bomb attack on the Marriott killed 53 people in the heart of Islamabad, there were reports of trouble both on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan and on the Line of Control with India.  

On the Afghan border, Pakistani troops fired on two U.S. helicopters that intruded into Pakistani airspace on Sunday night, forcing them to turn back to Afghanistan, according to a senior Pakistani security official.  On the Indian side, Pakistani and Indian troops exchanged fire across the Line of Control dividing Kashmir, in the latest breach of a ceasefire agreed in 2003. And as if that was not enough, Afghanistan’s top diplomat was kidnapped in Peshawar.

None of this is new in the sense that we have known about the tension on Pakistan’s borders, and its fragile internal security situation, for a long time. What is new is the scale of it. And how everything seems to be happening at once. And also the number of players involved — not only the United States (in mid presidential election), Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, but also the Pakistan Army and Pakistan’s new civilian government, along with the other powers on the sidelines, Saudi Arabia, China, and U.S. allies in NATO.

So which of these many players do you track most closely to assess what is happening in Pakistan? My hunch is to watch the Pakistan Army, and Pakistan’s powerful spy agency, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).

In a posting on the Pakistan Policy Blog, Arif Rafiq wrote about how army chief General Ashfaq Kayani had gone twice to the frontlines with India, each time after the civilian government had talked of making peace over Kashmir (small quibble - the photo in his blog looks like it was taken at the brigade headquarters at Yuching, rather than on the Siachen glacier, which is in Indian hands).

The Pakistan Army, and by extension the ISI, rightly or wrongly, sees itself as the ultimate defender of Pakistan. It would seem obvious that the Pakistan Army would not tolerate its authority being challenged on both fronts – by U.S. raids over the border with Afghanistan on one side, and by peace moves with India on the other. I realise too that there are many who argue that only democracy can save Pakistan.

The point of this posting is not to say who to judge. Simply who to watch. And who do you watch when a country’s borders are fragile and its capital city attacked?