Afghanistan (17 page)

After 2001, Pakistani policy was based on cooperation with the US (at least against “foreign” Al Qaeda) and providing continued support for the Bush administration Global War on Terrorism. The government of Pakistan did not take the opportunity to disrupt the Afghan political process—which excluded Pakistan’s Afghan clients—that started at Bonn in 2001. Pakistan did not interfere in Afghanistan’s politics throughout the Bonn process, including the Emergency Loya Jirga and the Constitutional Loya Jirga leading to the new constitution and the 2004 presidential and 2005 parliamentary elections. This Pakistani restraint, following Pakistan’s 2001 response to the US requirement for access to Afghanistan and its support for American military operations there, earned President
Musharraf the gratitude and support of President Bush. Musharraf’s rhetoric, his talking of starting long-needed reforms to revitalize Pakistan’s civil society and capability for governance, was well received in the West. But the results proved limited: US support for the Musharraf regime focused on capturing a limited number of high-ranking foreign Al Qaeda leaders.

Nevertheless, Pakistan’s long-standing strategy of the northward thrust did not go away. The Pakistan military became the strategic opponents of the US at the same time as they were cooperating in the US Global War on Terror and counting on US arms aid to redress the balance of forces with India. Post-2001, Afghanistan replaced Kashmir as the main focus of Pakistan’s security competition with India. Pakistan’s military saw the improvement in the US relationship with India, which had begun earlier in the 1990s, as a threat; Afghanistan could be the site of future US-Indian cooperation. The Pakistan military looked with concern at improved US-India and Israel-India relations. The US war in Iraq was seen by many Pakistanis as a reaction to Muslims having weapons of mass destruction, raising concerns among Pakistan’s government and elites—not just the military—that Pakistan, as the only openly nuclear Muslim state, would be the next target. US actions are seen by elites and grassroots alike as being part of a concerted effort to destabilize Pakistan.

Post-2001, Pakistan’s Afghanistan policy was seen by the Pakistani military leadership—as well as many civilian leaders throughout Pakistan’s political spectrum—not as part of a Global War on Terror. While Pakistan was willing to cooperate against Al Qaeda, it did not perceive the Afghan insurgents operating from its territory and their allies among their own Pushtun population as a potential national security threat.

Post-2001 Pakistan—not just the ISI—saw no threat from the exiled Afghan Taliban and other Afghan and Pakistani radical groups. Rather, Pakistan saw its Afghanistan policy primarily as part of their competition with India and secondarily an extension of domestic policies and politics, especially regarding Islam in government and the ethnic Pushtun population’s access to state power in Pakistan. Pakistan would cooperate against Al Qaeda and other foreign (non-Afghanistan or non-Pushtun) terrorists. The Pakistan military was willing to act against terrorism aimed at
Pakistan outside the borderlands or at the US and UK because it saw this as a threat to themselves and their outside patrons. This met the primary US Global War on Terror goal and also pleased China and Saudi Arabia, Pakistan’s other key foreign supporters, who feared indigenous terrorists in Al Qaeda’s camp.

At the state level, the trust gap between the US and Pakistan widened starting after 2001.
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Pakistan was alarmed at developments in Afghanistan. Even while Musharraf was seen as an ally of the Bush administration’s Global War on Terrorism, Pakistan’s military leadership was pre-occupied with walking a tightrope between meeting the demands of the US-led coalition and rebuilding its Afghan policy on the same lines, operating through proxy forces that had failed so totally in 2001. Pakistan saw the US as undercutting its national security interests by blocking its need for a Pakistan-friendly government in Kabul. It saw the initial post-2001 cabinet positions held by members of the Northern Alliance being easily bought or manipulated by Iran or India. It also saw a government not dominated by Pushtuns as unacceptable. Hamid Karzai, educated in India, had been expelled from Pakistan when an ISA diplomat in the 1990s. He had few friends and admirers in Islamabad, fewer still in Rawalpindi (where the military and intelligence headquarters are).

In actuality, the post-2001 Musharraf policy was largely aimed at maintaining Pakistan’s capabilities for implementing its pre-2001 policies—including the proxy war in Afghanistan—while waiting out the US and coalition military departure from the region. While Pakistan’s cooperation against Al Qaeda was genuine, if limited, Musharraf’s rhetoric proved hollow. Pakistan aimed to maintain ISI leverage over the Afghan Taliban and other radical Afghan and Pakistani factions now rebuilding in the Vortex, which they believed they could control and provided Pakistan with a vital national security capability. Pakistan’s post-2001 policy first became evident when Pakistan limited its military efforts to round up Al Qaeda and Taliban fugitives coming over the border after Operation Anaconda, the Battle of Tora Bora in 2002. The preoccupation of the Pakistani military with its long-standing Indian opponents after the 13 December 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament raised tensions
and meant that there were few resources on the ground on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line. Pakistan’s cooperation against “foreign” Al Qaeda terrorism continued. The Musharraf government proudly pointed to its anti-terrorist cooperation with the West, most notably in the trans-Atlantic airliners conspiracy that was revealed in 2006. More senior Al Qaeda personnel have been caught in Pakistan than any other country, reflecting the continued presence of their leadership as well as Pakistan’s cooperation with the US and UK.

Continued ISI coordination with Pakistani religious parties and its Afghan clients made the infrastructure, systems, and networks along the Afghan-Pakistani frontier that had existed since the 1970s available for future use inside Afghanistan following 2001. The ability of the post-2001 terrorist and insurgent networks to make use of this infrastructure is apparent by the fact that all Al Qaeda members with ISI links that have been captured in Pakistan have been found in safe houses connected with Sunni Kashmir groups. These same training camps established for the Afghan resistance in the 1980s in Mahsehra, Miranshah, Shamshutta, and elsewhere were supporting insurgents post-2001.
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To the Pakistan military, the US 2005 decision to turn the security of southern Afghanistan over to NATO was seen in Pakistan as leading to imminent US disengagement, leaving a vacuum in Afghanistan that, if Pakistan did not fill, its rivals—India, Iran—certainly would. The US seemed to be on track to disengage from Afghanistan, first because of Iraq and then because of a lack of political will to sustain a commitment.

By 2006, the sanctuary that Afghan insurgents were receiving became a major issue in US-Pakistan relations. Individuals within the Pakistan government, especially under Musharraf, were obviously strong supporters of the Afghan insurgents, including passing intelligence.
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The open work of the Quetta shura, the Afghan Taliban’s ruling body, and other insurgent command organizations, the flow of logistics support and casualty evacuation, and the well-known location of training camps all suggest more than simple complicity.
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Only one senior Al Qaeda figure was caught in Pakistan in the 2005–08 period. Overall arrests of Al Qaeda went down in that period. Yet Musharraf still received the support of the US government that was
to endure even when it appeared that his government’s legitimacy was rapidly waning in 2007–08. The 2008 worldwide economic downturn hit Pakistan early and hard, adding desperation to their strategic worldview. The “fatal problem was too much faith in Musharraf,” according to US terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman.
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In 2007–08, the always complex and troubled Afghanistan-Pakistan relationship reached a nadir. The attempted assassination of Afghan President Hamid Karzai was publicly blamed on Pakistan-based terrorists. Afghan frustration at Pakistan’s claims to be an innocent victim of insurgency, while at the same time harboring and supporting those fighting in Afghanistan, rose. Press reports of ISI involvement in terrorist actions in Afghanistan, such as the bombing on the Indian embassy and funding Taliban insurgents, increased the tension. In 2009 polling, some 91 percent of Afghans had an unfavorable view of Pakistan and 86 percent had a negative view of Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan.
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By 2008, the end of the Musharraf government and an improved military relationship between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the US, including the establishment of the first of a series of tripartite intelligence fusion centers near the border at the Khyber Pass, improved Pakistan-Afghanistan relations.

The 2008 elections in Pakistan started to turn around the relationship. There has been considerable improvement since 2008 when, in the words of Mohamed Mahmud Stanekzai, former Afghan minister of communications, “Afghanistan and Pakistan, with elected governments, could start efforts to negotiate from both sides.”
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In 2008, MG Mark Milley, deputy commander at Regional Command East, saw an improvement in cross-border coordination from previous years: “I talk to the Pakistanis almost every day. We are linked in at all levels. We coordinate operations with the Pakistani military.”
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A series of Pakistan-Afghanistan peace jirgas have been organized; these have demonstrated cooperation but lack the participation of a number of important players, both within each country and from the region as a whole. Canada has taken a hands-on role in the Dubai process for government-to-government Afghanistan-Pakistan contacts on cross-border issues and security.
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But suspicions remain. The Tripartite Commission, set up in August 2008, is supposed to alternate meeting between Pakistan and Afghanistan but has been slow
to get under way. Joint operations between Pakistan and ANA or coalition forces are still not taking place, although there is a greater degree of coordination, such as reporting troop movements in the border area to avoid inadvertent firefights.

The US campaign of using armed UAVs against Al Qaeda, Afghan, and Pakistani insurgent leaders on Pakistani territory has proven effective. But killing a number of leaders, while potentially valuable, has never in the past proven decisive in defeating a large-scale insurgency. These attacks are unlikely to improve the perceived legitimacy of the government of Pakistan. Neither the US nor the government of Pakistan has sought to explain the UAV attacks or justify them in terms of Pakistan’s security. Dr. David Kilcullen, an Australian expert on counter-insurgency warfare, said of the UAV campaign in 2009: “We need to call off the drone attacks . . . the drone attacks are highly unpopular. They are deeply aggravating to the population. And they’ve given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists and leads to spikes of extremism. The current path we are on is leading us to loss of Pakistani government control over its own population.”
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However, this negative impact would be much greater if there were additional on-the-ground incursions into Pakistan by US or Afghan forces. The outcry over such a perceived incursion in 2008 showed that for all the costs of the UAV campaign, it is apparently effective and it limits the direct liability of both the US and Pakistan.

Attempts to target bin Laden himself have been ongoing—without success—since 2001. It is accepted as fact throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan that this is evidence that the US is not really interested in him as a target but actually is using him as a rationale either for the continued war against Islam, for those that are anti-US, or for geopolitical reasons for supporters of the US.

The Vortex and Pakistani Strategy

Pakistan’s national security strategy remains the province of the military. Despite the 2008 election and the return to democratic rule, the Pakistani military still remains in control of security policies, including that dealing with Afghanistan. Pakistan still insists on the marginalization of other
regional players in Afghanistan and the exclusion of India; a government in Kabul must be friendly to Pakistan to avoid encirclement from India. Pushtun-dominated government in Kabul also remains a major policy goal, driven by internal Pakistani politics. However, the goal of access to central Asia appears to have fallen by the wayside. The concept of “strategic depth” that motivated much of the original thinking behind the northward thrust has become less important in terms of a security competition in which the India-Pakistan nuclear balance plays a major part. The international presence in Afghanistan and the multiethnic democratic elected government in Kabul continue to be largely seen alike by ISI as at best passing phases or, at worst, part of the attempted encirclement of a nuclear Pakistan.

Pakistan’s governmental and non-governmental elites, much as they may resent the military, are more likely to align with and trust them than the highly polarized, distrusted, and frequently corrupt elected officials. In the view of the ISI, the security threat to Pakistan has greatly increased since 2001, but it was only in 2009 that they began to see the insurgency as part of this. In the words one of former Pakistani officer, “Show where the threats to Pakistan have gone away and only then can our Afghanistan policy go away.” To this, a veteran Afghan political observer replied “that is because Pakistan’s Afghanistan policy has actually created many of the threats that they face, including the insurgency and out-of-control Islamic radical groups.”

In 2008–10, Pakistan’s military’s role in governing at home was undercut by the unpopularity of the later years of the Musharraf regime, although the lack of capability demonstrated by the elected government shows signs of reversing this trend. Yet the military still sees itself as the custodian of Pakistani nationalism and statehood. This has made the events of the Musharraf years, including the decision to enable the US-led intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 and the decision to halt the cross-border insurgency into Kashmir in 2003–04, hard for them to embrace. Both have largely been seen as examples of where Pakistan has given in to external pressure and received only a diminished national security posture in return. The military, even if it is reluctant to return to running the country, is fighting hard to retain its political and economic
power and it has no interest in change that would undercut this. Therefore, they cling to the Indian threat and their hold in Afghanistan much tighter.