Pakistan's Coming Storm?

Pakistan's coming storm
BY PAULA NEWBERG
Khaleej Times: 2 March 2007

FOR the first time since the Americans turned their gaze away from
Afghanistan towards Iraq, leaving Al Qaeda to lick its wounds and
regroup, Pakistan's mountainous tribal territories have returned to
centre stage in the global fight against terrorism. This new focus on
the Pukhtun borderlands highlights the difficult political terrain on
which Pakistan's contentious foreign policy is built — and the
dangerous ground on which its hopes for recovering democracy may rise
or fall.


To the dismay of its friends and glee of its militant foes, the
country that the US calls "our partner in the war on terror" is having
a tough year. As Pakistan suffers through suicide bombings and
sectarian discord, remaining on high terror alert, its ambitions
remain surprisingly unclear. Pakistan's difficulties in reconciling
the demands of its anti-terror allies with those of its own citizens
raise critical questions about the viability of its regional ambitions
and the durability of its ham-handed political system.

This is a familiar predicament for Pakistan, which has spent 60 years
of independence trying to sort out how to live safely, peaceably and
prosperously in a region where, paradoxically, its role seems to
vacillate between victim and interloper. Convinced that its neighbours
mean harm — sometimes correctly, sometimes not — Pakistan's
politicians and army officers conspired decades ago to establish a
national-security state that has only deepened the country's
fissiparous tendencies and political fragmentation. The country's
diverse communities struggle mightily against one another as often as
they challenge the government to secure their rights. With sectarians
and tribal leaders battling politicians and soldiers on both sides of
the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, the stakes this year continue to
rise.

Policy and patronage have always clashed in Pakistan's unruly
politics. But as the military has become more powerful and corrupt,
its obdurate and self-interested ambitions have, in a perplexing and
self-defeating way, limited its strategic ambitions. The military has
secured its political dominance, for example, by supporting an
entrenched militant insurgency in Kashmir that it finds hard to give
up, and has cemented its role in civil society as an enormous — and
inevitably, conservative — commercial force. Aiming for security,
Pakistan has consistently opted for a more limited stability that
cannot possibly keep it safe. Its incremental failures have not only
confused the conflicted, lightly governed border territory it shares
with Afghanistan, but also turned the entire country into a target for
domestic and global terror.

General Pervez Musharraf — keen to keep the power he appropriated
seven years ago — has recognised some of the perils of this approach,
particularly as it affects Pakistan's relationship to India. After a
long dry spell, the two countries have resumed bilateral talks on a
range of critical issues, including nuclear proliferation and control,
intelligence sharing and the status of Kashmir.

This should be encouraging news. But as it has been for too many
decades, Pakistan's foreign policy remains double-sided and
double-minded. With India as the focus for long-term strategy and a
consequent desire to dominate Afghanistan in a counterbalancing policy
called strategic depth, all the problems that Afghanistan represents
for Pakistan lead to short-term, reactive confusion for its powerful
soldiers, weak politicians and foreign allies alike.

No place is more complicated and awkward than the western border, the
place where Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar are still
rumoured to hide and where the chasms between government power and
local autonomy are revealed daily. Islamabad's grudging efforts to
plug the holes in the border last year in Waziristan — where the army
arrived in full battle rattle to fight a 19th century war against an
insurgency of indeterminate means — failed so dreadfully as to suggest
that it was simultaneously undercutting its local alliances and
risking its own security. Pakistan's subsequent decision to turn over
border control to local tribes who were then meant to thwart Taleban
fighters hasn't worked, either.

Attentive to the demands of the US if not the norms of the
international community, Pakistan has proposed small, ineffective
initiatives in the past year, threatening in quick succession to fence
and mine the border, then hastily retracting the latter notion, and
return refugees to chaotic Afghanistan. This muddle is a far cry from
the intrusive, but clearer, policy of strategic depth that earlier
impelled Pakistan's generals. In truth, Islamabad seems not to know
whether it wants its border to be a buffer against instability, a
holding pen for bellicose tribes or a staging ground for further
interference in Afghanistan. Little wonder that it appears one day to
support negotiations with the Taliban, another to dismiss the
movement's potency, a third to encourage cross-border tribal
consultations and, on most days, to define its relationship with its
own frontier tribes and parties by bribery, punishment and rancor.

These inimitable border conflicts reveal the searing hole at the heart
of Pakistan's politics. While the world's eyes focus on the faltering
enterprises of state building and security in Afghanistan, the same
critical processes remain unfinished in Pakistan, where decades of
nimble state patronage have turned politics into artful but dangerous
and continuing manipulations. The military sets up Islamists to
challenge secularists and tribal leaders and so divide tribes from
themselves; the state patronises militants; and political parties —
the leaven for resolving disputes in robust democracies — wither on
the sidelines.

The greatest threat to the state remains, ironically, the management
of the state itself, and its weaknesses highlight Pakistan's perpetual
disputes between militarism and participatory democracy. When
challenged about tactics and strategy, Musharraf reverts to a
soldier's accounting of war: assassination attempts, soldiers lost to
battle and the frustrations of volatile tribal politics. He rarely
tallies the number of renditions undertaken at the behest of the Bush
administration, the hundreds of disappearances detailed by the
Pakistan Human Rights Commissions or the acute crisis these practices
inflict on an already compromised judicial system.

Musharraf's detour on the road to democracy, with support from
allegedly pro-democracy Washington, has compromised Pakistan's
capacity to govern itself well and securely. Unbothered by the soft
bigotry of low expectations, Washington went to war in 2001 with the
ally it could cajole and buy, not the one it might ideally want.
Despite recent criticism from the US and persistent critiques at home,
Musharraf knows that the current US anti-terror campaign relies on the
same border — the place President Bush cavalierly calls "wilder than
the Wild West" — whose porosity the US now conveniently decries. The
president-general also anticipates that while opinion is shifting
during Washington's budget-and-blaming season, the Bush administration
is unlikely to do anything that might compromise the fragile
US-Pakistan alliance that keeps him in office.

Let's hope he's wrong. Pakistan's familiar political disarray and
bickering politicians will continue to tax the patience of Pakistan's
and America's generals. No doubt Musharraf will bank on the popular
fear of extremism to tide him over in an election year in which he
should not even be a candidate. But if Pakistan is to repair its torn
political fabric and fix its tattered border, the army's hold over
domestic politics and foreign policy — the calculus nurtured for
decades — needs to be broken. Support for even a small peace with
India may help Musharraf lead the way: to declare victory, and,
finally, turn over Pakistan's future to its voters.

Paula Newberg is an international consultant who has covered south
Asia's politics for more than two decades.