Fiascos galore
Rashed Rahman
Barely a month
into its tenure, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) coalition government
appears to be floundering. To be fair, given the enormous challenges facing the
country, it was to be expected that the incoming government would take some
time to settle in and find its feet. But it is the manner in which the PTI-led
government has gone about its task that gives the appearance of floundering.
First and
foremost, the controversy about the elections seems to have withered on the
vine. With the exception of Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the rest of the opposition
gave the appearance of having moved on. The other day, however, PML-N president
Shahbaz Sharif resurrected the demand for a parliamentary commission to probe
the conduct of the elections. This demand, in a show of magnanimity, the
government has accepted in principle. Even if such a commission comes into
being, it will have its task cut out for it since the trail has by now gone
cold.
Next, US Secretary
of State Mike Pompano’s stopover produced positive optics but little change in
substance. Both sides stood their ground, albeit in a polite, friendly manner.
Washington continues to condition an improvement in relations to dealing with
the presence of the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani Network on Pakistani soil,
if not by expulsion (an idea the military establishment will not consider for
its blowback implications as well as losing thereby a strategic asset in the
Afghan quagmire), then by nudging them to the negotiating table. Since the US
has itself reversed its earlier stance of no negotiations with the Taliban, the
logical path for Pakistan would be to leverage its influence with the Afghan
Taliban to get them to agree to seriously engage in negotiations (even if the
fighting continues). If Pakistan is unable to deliver on this reasonable
demand, the relationship with the US, with its concomitant fallout on our
economy and finances, will continue as before, if not get worse. The reason
why, despite tough talk (allayed by ‘good cop’ interventions), Pompeo’s
delegation seemed all smiles and good cheer in Islamabad is owed to the
Pentagon’s advice not to strangle the strategic ties between them and GHQ,
which have survived many ups and downs in the history of this troubled
relationship. Those ties are underpinned by the Pentagon’s appreciation of a
large, battle-hardened Muslim army available if need be to help police the
unstable region in which Pakistan lies.
Prime Minister (PM)
Imran Khan reiterated after the Pompeo visit his long held view that Pakistan
should not fight “somebody else’s war”. That has been his critique over many
years of former US President George Bush’s declaration of a War on Terror after
9/11. However, the PM’s formulation suffers from a convenient lapse of memory. First
and foremost, long before the series of events that led up to the present
impasse, Pakistan was already fighting its ‘own’ war in Afghanistan. When
neither the Afghan Communists were yet in power nor the Soviet Union or the US
had entered the fray, PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto laid the foundations of Pakistani
intervention in Afghanistan’s internal affairs by launching an embryonic
version of the Afghan mujahideen against the government of Sardar Daud in 1973.
These embryonic mujahideen groups were composed largely of Afghan radical
Islamic professors, students and their supporters in Kabul University. They
fled for their lives to Pakistan when Sardar Daud overthrew the monarchy in
Afghanistan and declared the country a republic. Bhutto took these nascent
resistance groups under his wing, tasking late retired General Nasirullah Babar
with the task of training and equipping them for an armed struggle against
Kabul. Bhutto’s motivation was to use these initial Islamic warriors to
pre-empt or make difficult Sardar Daud’s support for the Baloch and Pashtun
struggles that broke out in 1973 after Bhutto dismissed Sardar Attaullah Mengal’s
ministry and unleashed a massive military operation against the Baloch.
When the Afghan
Communists overthrew Daud in 1978, Bhutto’s legacy in this regard was taken
over by General Ziaul Haq’s regime. But it was not until the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan in 1979, ostensibly to ‘save’ the Afghan revolution but which ended
up instead strangling it in its infancy, that the business of jihad, after a
faltering start, took on the dimensions and hues it did. After the Communist
government of Najib was overthrown by the mujahideen in 1992, a bitter and
destructive civil war broke out between rival mujahideen factions that proved
intractable and seemingly insoluble. Having arrived at this conclusion, Benazir
Bhutto’s government launched the Afghan Taliban in 1994, with the ubiquitous
General (retd) Babar again in charge. After its victory in 1996, the Taliban opened
the door to 9/11 by hosting Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and paid a heavy
price at the hands of the US invasion and occupation of their country in 2001.
Whatever differences
of opinion (or indifference of the US after the Soviets withdrew in 1989)
existed between Washington and Islamabad till then, fuelled the duality of
policy adopted by General Musharraf to keep the US ostensibly sweet while
saving the Afghan Taliban as strategic assets. Today’s differences rest on the
foundations of this track record, which clearly indicate that Pakistan was the
initiator and constant companion of the US in the Afghan extended adventure. This
hardly answers to the description of “somebody else’s” war.
The other pearl
of wisdom delivered by PM Imran Khan in recent days was the bald assertion that
the civil-military divide is a “myth”. Perhaps the Prime Minister needs
reminding of the military’s role in our history, including four military coups
(1958, 1969, 1977 and 1999) and almost half of our history since independence
spent under martial rule. Each one of these military coups was against civilian
elected governments. In the interregnum when civilians were ostensibly in
power, the military ran strategic policies from behind the curtain. If anything
is guaranteed to produce a civil-military divide, this track record is
sufficient. It is another matter that wide swathes of public opinion (not just
the opposition political parties) perceive the Imran Khan government as having
been installed by the military establishment, whose lap the PM seems to be
settled cozily in. In turn, the current military leadership appears to be
standing in close support of Imran Khan’s government. This may be considered
the culmination of Imran Khan’s long struggle to persuade successive army
chiefs since Musharraf that he belonged in the PM’s chair.
Last but by no
means least, the PTI-led government has been left with egg on its face in the
Economic Advisory Council affair. If an Ahmedi, despite his eminent
qualifications, cannot serve as a member of the Council, two other prominent
economists on it declared, they could not serve either and both resigned in
protest. We are left with wailing and complaining about what happened to Jinnah’s
Pakistan. What happened is that the use of extremist, fanatical, jihadi proxies
(initially in Afghanistan, since 1989 in Kashmir) rebounded against us in the emergence
(and creation) of homegrown terrorist groups that use religion to hold the
polity hostage. The latest avatar amongst such groups is the Barelvi
Tehreek-e-Labaik Pakistan, the new replacement for the Deobandi/Wahhabi proxies
who have passed their sell-by date.
With even the greatest
goodwill and leeway to the new government, the above are just some examples of
the appearance of the incumbents floundering from one fiasco to the next. And
we have not even (for reasons of space) dealt yet with the biggest challenge of
all – the economy. Of that, more later.
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