By Cyril Almeida
THE Pakistani state has taken so many wrong turns in the past that it’s almost a surprise there are any more turns left to take.
But at a crossroads it is again: almost a decade after it should have become clear that the age of nurturing ‘non-state actors’ had passed, the state has a second chance to bury that madcap policy.
Eight years ago, Al Qaeda brought down the World Trade Centre and America pursued it into Afghanistan. We were faced with a choice then: understand the long-term significance of that seminal event and adjust our strategic outlook accordingly or bury our heads in the sand and hope the storm would blow over quickly enough.
We, or rather the Pakistan Army led by Musharraf, chose the latter. Our decision: bag as many Al Qaeda types as possible while sweeping our home-grown jihadis under the carpet and shielding the Afghan Taliban from America’s prying eyes. The policy ‘worked’ because the Bush administration only seemed to care about Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and even on that front got distracted soon enough by its interest in Iraq.
Musharraf and his cohorts were smug: they got tens of billions of dollars in return for simply putting their strategic-depth policy and jihadis in cold storage. When the time was right, they would simply reactivate those guys and use them once again to pursue strategic depth in Afghanistan and as a potent threat against India.
Two problems - serious problems - were always apparent: one, the security establishment didn’t comprehend the pernicious effect of Al Qaeda on our jihadis; and, two, the security establishment didn’t comprehend the long-term strategic fallout of 9/11.
The first problem meant that we continued to believe we could by and large control the home-grown jihadis and Afghan Taliban operating from our soil. Eight years later, with the northwest and Fata acutely destabilising Pakistan proper, we now conclusively know how naïve that policy was. Al Qaeda and its ideology are a virus, and once it infects its victim, it takes over - gone are the illusions of ‘control’ by the security establishment over its erstwhile puppets.
The second problem meant that we didn’t realise how dangerously Pakistan was isolating itself regionally and internationally. The first thought any leader would have had after 9/11 was: not in my backyard. The destructive power of non-state actors had been seared onto the world’s collective consciousness and henceforth the tolerance for anyone playing with that same fire was exceedingly low.
Because Musharraf dealt primarily with the clumsy, Iraq-obsessed Bush administration, he and his generals missed that seismic strategic shift. Once again, eight years later it is readily apparent: terrorism and Pakistan’s connection to it as at the top of the agenda of our relations with virtually any state important to us. Name the country - China, UK, Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE - and it is more likely than not to be fretting over security concerns.
But now we have a second shot at changing course and doing the right thing. The military operation in Swat, Buner and Dir could be the springboard for a wider policy of crushing militancy of all stripes inside Pakistan. No more good Taliban/bad Taliban, our guys versus Al Qaeda and Arab outsiders, but a clear, unequivocal sign that a militant is bad because he is a militant and not because of the kind of militant agenda he subscribes to.
Is that happening? Two very bad signs have been sent out this week that it is not.
First, Hafiz Saeed was released. This wasn’t a case of judicial activism by the superior judiciary, but a case of the inevitable given the lack of the government’s interest in prosecuting the leader of the group believed to be behind the Mumbai attacks last November.
Saeed’s release capped what has been a rather half-hearted, arguably farcical, attempt to clamp down on Jamaatud Dawa and its earlier incarnation, Lashkar-i-Taiba. Six months since the Mumbai attacks, it seems the security establishment has decided that the attacks were an aberration and that after a slap on the wrist, the group involved can go back into temporary obscurity.
Any crackpot theory about ‘pressurising’ India to renew the composite dialogue or to back off in Afghanistan by going easy on the Lashkar for now is just that: madness that doesn’t take into account how the international impression that Pakistan is an incorrigible sponsor of terrorism has been grimly reinforced.
Second, the kidnapping of the students of the Razmak Cadet College in the North Waziristan Agency. There is a sordid tale of the continuing good Taliban/bad Taliban distinction behind the incident. The bad Taliban in question is Baitullah Mehsud, the scourge of the country in recent years because of his habit of sending suicide bombers to attack security forces and cities and towns. The good guy was supposed to be Hafiz Gul Bahadur, a Taliban commander in North Waziristan and the man tasked with ensuring the safe passage of the students out of his territory.
Gul Bahadur is considered ‘good’ because he helped the state eject Uzbek militants linked to Al Qaeda from his area and because he doesn’t always get along with Baitullah. But good made common cause with the bad in this instance: Gul Bahadur double-crossed local officials who negotiated with him and tried to hand over the students to Baitullah.
Why? Because the very idea of good and bad Taliban is stupid. The ‘good’ stay good as long as their interests are not under threat: fearing that the state may be serious about crushing Baitullah - and for that we have to thank President Zardari for blurting it out and making international headlines - Gul Bahadur may have shrewdly, and logically, calculated that he could be next. So, better to help out a enemy now than risk losing his own kingdom later.
And why kidnap the students at all? Because if a military operation is imminent, wrong-footing the state may cause it to charge in unprepared. Militarily, it amounts to poking your opponent in the eye while he’s still donning his armour and picking up his weapons.
Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? Why, after eight years of a failed policy whose security fallout we are struggling to contain, are we still clinging to it so desperately? What can we not see that our security policy, born of an insecure mindset, has made us progressively less secure as a state?
There are many reasons, ones that security analysts, political scientists and historians readily proffer. But at the core of those explanations is the poverty of imagination of the security establishment.
Needy, greedy and seedy, it is like Tolkien’s Gollum. Just as the Ring extended his life but ended up enslaving him, so our security policy has dragged on the state, but at the cost of dragging us into a deep, dark place.
