Round The World

New Delhi, 3 March 2009

Revolt In Dhaka

CALL GEN KAYANI’S BLUFF

By M D Nalapat

(Prof, Geopolitics, Manipal Academy)

 
The ghastly revolt of the BDR in Bangladesh seems to have been orchestrated by the Pakistan army and its puppet, Khaleda Zia. Now that Sheikh Hasina has come to power through the ballot box, no longer does the writ of the Punjabis run in their former colony, a change that General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani is seething over. Controlling as his army does the minority Sindhis, Pashtuns and Baloch, the General would like to see Khaleda Zia restored to office, to “rule” over Bangladesh the way Aisin Gero Pu Yi “ruled” over Manchukuo for the Japanese during the years before the defeat of Japan in 1945.

How has the Pakistan army become such a malign force, intervening with impunity in countries across the region through its surrogates? The roots go back three decades, to the start of the Western war against the USSR in Afghanistan, a war outsourced to the Pakistan army by Zbigniew Brezezinski (President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor) and his successors in the Reagan administration.

After a decade of struggle, a demoralised and collapsing USSR crashed to defeat in Afghanistan in 1989. This defeat was a tactical victory for the Western alliance, but a strategic defeat. For, the induced success of the jihadis resulted in a boost of vain glory within them, leading to the expansion of their jihad to include the West. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri are the unintended consequences of the 1979-87 Brezezinski-Casey strategy of funding, training and equipping jihadists to fight a conventional force. Those lessons are now coming in handy for terrorists operating in the Afghan countryside, where NATO is floundering in a manner similar to the 1983-84 travails of the Soviet battalions.

If it can be said that the economic and other costs of the Afghan war helped push the USSR into collapse, then those determined to destabilize the West can argue that the immense financial cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (along with the concomitant speculative rise in commodity prices sparked by the conflict) are responsible for the meltdown in western economies that is being witnessed since the latter part of 2008.

Iraq and Afghanistan are two theatres made wholly different by conditions on the ground. While in the former, it has been the policy of occupation that has led to an essentially nationalist rebellion against the US and the UK (thus giving the religious Shiite parties an opportunity to secure the political space made empty by the recourse to insurgency of the secular nationalists), in Afghanistan, the resistance has come from the jihadists who since 1996 have been known as the Taliban. And as in the 80s and the 90s, the principal support base for this militia has been the Pakistan army. Whether it is training given by soldiers “on leave” or access to funds, safe houses and munitions, the Taliban would not be able to put up a viable front against NATO for more than a few months, had such support been denied to them.

Astonishingly, as yet the CIA, the DIA and numerous other US intelligence agencies appear clueless about the extent to which the Pakistan army is providing sustenance to the Taliban. Aware that numerous military, diplomatic and academic careers in the US would go up in smoke were it to be accepted that the policy of relying on the Pakistan army to fight its own auxilliary has been flawed, officials in the US are still in denial about the fact that the epicentre of terrorism is Pakistan

By refusing to take effective action against the sanctuaries given by the Pakistan military to the Afghan jihadis, NATO planners are preparing the ground for a Soviet-style retreat from Afghanistan that would give the jihadists the oxygen, lost after the setbacks caused by the US military and other action since 9/11.

The “head of the snake” i.e. the Taliban is the Pakistan army, and it is here that attention needs to be focussed, now that Gen Kayani has failed in his gambit of using the Mumbai terror attack to divert international attention away from his reluctance to engage the Taliban in Waziristan and in FATA. Because cash and other help gets funneled through religious “trusts” and other cutouts, and because of an undeclared policy that all soldiers fraternizing with the Taliban should be dressed in the same garb as the militia, thus far the apparently somnolent US intelligence agencies have failed to detect the multiple contacts between the Pakistan army and the jihadists, including the clearance given by the higher brass to missions directed against India and NATO

Kayani’s bluff needs to get called in a way that Soviet leaders did not do during the time when Zia ul-Haq (the founder of jihadism in a once-professional Pakistan army) was soaking up billions of dollars from the US to send irregulars into Afghanistan. The de facto President-cum-Prime Minister (aka army chief) of Pakistan needs to be given the message that unless his forces take out the Taliban within Waziristan and FATA, NATO will provide assistance in the form of air sorties, missile strikes and even troops on the ground that would decapitate the Taliban.

That the elimination of the Taliban within their nests in Pakistan has become a national security priority for the US and the EU, and that it is intolerable that success be denied because of the desire of the Pakistan army to be allowed to do a job that it is clearly unable or unwilling to accomplish, is a fact that was ignored by George W Bush, but hopefully will not by President Barack Obama

As matters are evolving, despite the infatuation of so many US and EU officials for the Pakistan military, planners in Western capitals may finally accept that the rapid metastizing of jihad from the safe areas in Pakistan is a hazard that needs immediate action to quell, and that the present policy of relying on Pakistan has not worked. And, after the 2009 elections in India, the new government in New Delhi may, on the request of Afghanistan Government, be willing to commit Indian troops to Kabul, to assist in the battle against a jihadist force that has carried out so many mass terror attacks in India.

While a fresh terror attack on India after Mumbai 26-28/11 may not lead to a military attack on Pakistan, it may convince the authorities that India needs to place military boots on the ground in Afghanistan, so as to assist that country and its friendly people resist the Pakistan army-sponsored Taliban.

Unless the Pakistan army gets liberated from the jihadist influence that has been steadily injected into it since the days of General Zia, it will remain an accessory to terror rather than a defender against it. Gen Kayani had calculated that the Mumbai attacks would lead to a troop mobilization by India on its western frontier, thus giving him a reason to refuse NATO's requests that he go after the Taliban rather than cosset them. That has not happened. The Indians have not mobilized.

However, what needs to be done next is not more of the same failed medicine (of depending on Kayani) but a clear ultimatum, followed by NATO action to take out Taliban nests. The people of FATA, Waziristan and the NWFP will themselves hand in the Taliban, once they see that having them in these areas does not bring goodies from the Pakistan army, but death from NATO attacks. The road to success in the war against the jihadists runs through Pakistan, and this route is too vital for the security of the world to remain in the control of the current leadership of the Pakistan army, unless that army can throw away the poisoned legacy of Brezezinski, Casey and Zia. ---INFA

 (Copyright, India News and Feature Alliance)