Submission by Professor Shaun Gregory,
Pakistan Security Research Unit, University of Bradford
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
(i) The UK, US and NATO are losing the war in
Afghanistan. The Afghan Taliban are in control or dominant in
about 70% of the country and in most of the key political areas
of Afghanistan. They are strongest in those regions which are
contiguous with Pakistan;(ii) Part of the explanation for this
is that Pakistan[166]
is antipathetic to Karzai's government and to any administration
in Afghanistan which is indulgent of Indian influence. Pakistan
thus wants the end of Karzai, a pro-Pakistani Pashtun government
in Afghanistan, and wants the UK/US/NATO out of Afghanistan;(iii)
For this reason—and others—Pakistan has been hosting
the Afghan Taliban since they were displaced from Afghanistan
in the wake of 9/11 and it is from Pakistan's northern Balochistan
and FATA that the Afghan Taliban have planned and conducted their
comeback in Afghanistan. Pakistan's role in this comeback lies
somewhere between passive tolerance of the Afghan Taliban to open
and active support;
(iv) Many have argued that it is only renegade
or former Pakistan intelligence [ISI] officers who are supporting
the Afghan Taliban, but in truth the ISI are a disciplined force
tightly controlled for the most part by the Pakistan military;
(v) Thus the UK/US/NATO find themselves in the
invidious position of being reliant on an "ally" which
does not share their interests and whom they cannot trust. Although
they have considerable leverage over Pakistan due to the reliance
of the Pakistan military/ISI on US military aid and the country
on non-military aid, Pakistan also has considerable leverage over
the West;
(vi) This leverage includes NATO/US/UK reliance
on Pakistan for overland logistics [about 80% of materiel and
40% of fuel] and for intelligence and overflights;
(vii) It also includes reliance on the Pakistan
army and ISI for intelligence in the war on terrorism and the
battle against tribal militants, al-Qaeda and the TTP/TNSM etc
in the FATA/NWFP; and reliance on the Pakistan Army to keep Pakistan's
nuclear weapons and nuclear-related technology out of the hands
of terrorists;
(viii) In addition Pakistan hints at "coercive"
options which would make life even more difficult for the UK/US/NATO;
(ix) US/UK/NATO efforts to do anything about
this situation and push or incentivize Pakistan to more co-operative
actions and positions is subject to very powerful obstacles;
(x) Despite these obstacles there are ways forward
for the US/UK/NATO with respect to Pakistan. These include taking
steps to reduce Pakistan's logistics leverage [such as NATO is
already doing in looking for alternative routes through central
Asia], looking at the modalities of logistics through Pakistan,
reaching out to India for help and co-operation in many related
areas, shifting the balance of aid to Pakistan from the military
to the non-military, and ensuring that military aid to Pakistan
is subject to conditionality, transparency and accountability;
(xi) In sum we can no longer afford a "business
as usual" relationship with the Pakistan military. Not at
least while Pakistan itself is in crisis, while NATO falters in
Afghanistan, while the number of NATO casualties in Afghanistan
rises, while the number of terrorist plots with links to Pakistan
continues to rise, or while the risks of a nuclear terrorist attack
with its origins in Pakistan remains.
Some of my arguments and brief outlines of the
evidence for all these assertions is laid out in the following
pages:
2. Policy Themes
I wanted to start by setting out a number of
the constants in Pakistan's defence and security thinking because
these give us insight into why Pakistan behaves as it does and
the degree to which the interests of Pakistan and the West—by
which I mean primarily the US, UK and NATO are at odds in many
areas. Five issues I think are fundamental:
(1) that faced with a conflictual and powerful
India to its east, Pakistan's security demands a friendly Afghanistan
to its west both to provide it with "strategic space"
and to ensure that Pakistan is not trapped between two adversaries;
(2) that having been through the trauma of the break
up of east and west Pakistan in 1971 with defeat by India and
the creation of Bangladesh, Pakistan has become obsessed about
further threats to the integrity of what remains of the original
Pakistan;
(3) that since the Zia ul-Haq years [1977-88],
Pakistan has been undergoing a process of Islamization which has
moved Pakistan away from the pluralist secular vision of its founding
fathers towards an Islamized polity in which Sharia asserts
an ever stronger role, and in which the centre of gravity in Pakistan's
politics—and within the Pakistan military and intelligence
services—has become ever more Islamic;
(4) that subject to isolation and sanctions through
the 1990s following the Soviet-Afghan war, Pakistan created and/or
supported numerous extremist and terrorist organisations as instruments
of state policy, both in relation to its international security
objectives within the region and across the Islamic world as far
afield as Algeria; and for internal purposes, particularly in
relation to Kashmir, opposition to domestic secular pluralist
political forces, and to perceived Shia threats to Pakistan's
Sunni majority;
(5) that Pakistan's Army needs to be understood
as the country's most powerful and cohesive institution and that
its direct engagement in politics since the 1950s means we should
not understand the Pakistan army in the kind of terms with which
we would think of NATO armed forces. For the Pakistan Army's supporters
it is the one institution which has held the country together
in the face of instability and a corrupt political class. To its
detractors the Pakistan Army has stifled the evolution of democracy
in Pakistan and locked the country into a paranoid security paradigm
which only serves to fuel insecurity and underwrite the continued
national dominance of the Army.
3. Pakistan's Support for the Taliban
In order to begin to understand what is going
on in the FATA and NWFP today we have to understand that Pakistan
and Afghanistan are intimately interlinked and in some respects
need to be understood as two halves of the same walnut. One way
into the issues is by thinking about Pakistan's relations with
the Afghan Taliban. As is well known Pakistan supported and empowered
the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan between about 1992 and
1996 as a means of imposing some order and stability on the chaos
of post-Soviet warlord-dominated Afghanistan, and was one of only
three states to give diplomatic recognition to the Taliban government.
Pakistan did this because the Taliban are a Pashtun group and
Pakistan has always sought to assert its control of Afghanistan—and
thus to prevent Afghanistan falling under Indian influence—through
the Pashtuns who constitute about 50% of the Afghan population
and are dominant in Afghanistan's most important political regions.
There are about 50 million Pashtuns in total, roughly 20 million
in Afghanistan and 28 million in Pakistan.
Following 9/11 Pakistan was put under intense pressure
and offered lavish rewards by the US to turn against the Taliban
and although Pakistan had little choice but to comply with this,
the crucial point is that the underlying fundamentals of Pakistani
security policy did not change. The Karzai government which emerged
in Afghanistan is antipathetic to Pakistan and is indulgent of
Indian influence—for example the Indian "consulates"
springing up across Afghanistan— much to Pakistan's alarm.
Pakistan thus wants an end to the Karzai government and it also
wants the US and NATO out of the Afghan theatre, because NATO
props up Karzai, is permissive of Indian influence, and because
the ongoing war with the Taliban is destabilizing Pakistan. The
Taliban remain Pakistan's best instrument for achieving all three
objectives because they are able to sustain—arguably with
some Pakistani support or at least Pakistani tolerance—a
grinding insurgency which Pakistan expects to force eventually
both a political accommodation with the Taliban in Afghanistan
and a Western deal with the Taliban to find a face-saving exit
from Afghanistan.
4. Taliban in Balochistan
Thus Pakistan has provided a safe haven for
the Afghan Taliban since 9/11, not least in Pakistan's South Western
province of Balochistan. The added bonus of having the Taliban
in Balochistan—where throughout much of the Musharraf years
they were hosted by the Islamist MMA which, with Musharraf's support,
dominated the Balochistan provincial assembly—is that the
Taliban and MMA have played an important role in suppressing Balochi
nationalism which, as one senior Pakistani military figure remarked,
threatens Pakistan's territorial integrity in a way that the Taliban
at the time did not.
This explains why the Taliban were—and still
are—free to operate from Balochistan, in particular from
around Quetta, despite the presence of huge numbers of Pakistan
military in the province and much to the anger of NATO and UK
commanders, particularly after the deployments to Southern Afghanistan
in 2005 which found themsleves taking casualties from the Taliban
who then simply retreated to safety across the Pakistan border.
Recent claims by Pakistan to have moved against the Taliban shura
in Balochistan do not appear to have been substantiated.
5. Taliban in the FATA/NWFP
The picture of the Taliban in Pakistan's northern
NWFP and FATA is similar but even more complex. These areas have
always been beyond the direct control of Pakistan but have been
managed successfully through the exploitation of tribal power
structures, which Pakistan understands well. In the aftermath
of 9/11 the Taliban has also been tolerated in the NWFP and has
been de facto permitted—through a series of "peace
deals" with Pakistan—to attack Afghan and NATO forces
across the border provided they did not threaten Pakistan itself.
The situation has been further complicated by the emergence of
Mehsud's Pakistan Taliban, the TTP, and groups like Fazlullah's
TNSM, both of whose agenda is not Afghanistan, but the overthrow—or
rather the complete Islamisation—of the Pakistani state.
I'll say more about these groups in a moment.
6. Kashmir—FATA NWFP
It's worth also just adding that Pakistan's ISI transited
some of the Afghan Jihadi fighters from Afghanistan at the end
of the 1980s into Kashmir to try to wrest Kashmir from India.
To do this it set up a network of terrorist training camps in
Pakistani Administered Kashmir and either created or empowered
groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed for that struggle.
Some of these groups -who were trained by the Pakistan army for
guerrilla insurgency—have also made their way into Pakistan's
tribal areas in the last few years where they have brought these
skills to the tribal militants. Lashkar-e-Toiba of course is the
organisation which carried out the attacks on the Indian parliament
in December 2001, and is strongly suspected of having been behind
the November 2008 commando-style attacks in Mumbai.
7. Pakistan and al-Qaeda
Pakistan, and in particular Pakistan's lead intelligence
agency—the ISI—has had a close relationship with Osama
Bin Laden—and thus with al-Qaeda—since the Soviet
Afghan war. At the end of that war in 1989 and 1990 the ISI tried
to use Bin Laden for its jihad in Kashmir. The ISI also tried
to co-opt Bin Laden for an attempt to remove Benazir Bhutto who
was Prime Minister for the first time between 1988 and 1990, and
this was the ground of Benazir's claim that ISI veterans—still
influential in Pakistan—were complicit in the first attempt
on her life in Karachi in October 2007, just a few months before
she was so tragically assassinated.
It was the ISI which introduced Bin Laden to the
Taliban in 1996 when he returned to Afghanistan, thereby gifting
al-Qaeda a secure base from which to emerge as a genuinely global
threat, and it was the ISI which tipped off Bin Laden about a
series of attempts on his life in the late 1990s by the US in
retaliation for al-Qaeda attacks in East Africa.
In case anyone is interested I can make available
a paper I wrote in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism in Washington
in December 2007, which provides much greater detail about the
ISI-al-Qaeda relationship. The long and complex relationship between
the ISI and al-Qaeda must I think inform any analysis of Pakistan's
response to al-Qaeda post 9/11.
8. Pakistan's Army Operations in the FATA/NWFP
The situation in the FATA/NWFP today is thus
deeply complex and spiralling out of control. The Pakistan Army—post
Musharraf—has stepped up military action in Bajaur province
and neighbouring Mohmand province in particular and the new COAS
Kiyani is trumpeting this as a "new realism" in the
Army and as evidence of a willingness to tackle the militants,
but there are reasons to doubt this.
The militants the Pakistan Army are fighting in the
FATA and NWFP appear to be mainly Baitullah Meshud's Tehreek-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan
[TTP], and Maulana Fazlullah's Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammedi
[TNSM]. These groups comprise almost entirely Pakistani nationals,
many radicalised by the Western presence in Afghanistan, by Pakistan's
"support" for the West, and by US airstrike in the FATA.
The Pakistan Army also appears to be taking on some elements of
al-Qaeda and some foreign groups—notably Uzbecks and some
Arabs/Turks/Chinese Uighurs—which also pose a direct threat
to the security of Pakistan itself, in a way the Afghan Taliban
do not.
9. Afghan Taliban in the FATA/NWFP
The Pakistan Army however is still not moving
against Mullah Omar's Afghan Taliban, nor is it moving against
its erstwhile proxies in the Afghan-War and its aftermath—the
Jallaludin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmayar militant armies. Nor,
despite the Mumbai attacks, is it moving against those elements
of Kashmiri separatists such as the LeT which have relocated to
the FATA, though under intense US, British and Indian pressure
it has made arrests of many Jamaat-u-Dawah [JUD] members,
the JuD being widely viewed as an LeT front. The reason for this
is that these groups will offer Pakistan the future influence
it wants in Afghanistan [and in Kashmir] and Pakistan will thus
put up with Western pressure to do more about these groups because
it believes that the US and NATO cannot win in Afghanistan and
that a deal with the Taliban is inevitable.
Thus it is that stories continue to emerge about
the apparently free movement of the Taliban across the Afghan-Pakistan
border, about the Afghan Taliban moving unchallenged—or
with Pakistan Army permission—through Pakistani checkpoints,
and about arms caches and training being provided to the Afghan
Taliban by Pakistan, all of which Pakistan of course strongly
rebuts and dismisses as US or Afghan propaganda.
The suicide attack on the Indian embassy in
Kabul on 7 July 2008 which killed more than 40 and injured more
than 200 has been unequivocally linked to the ISI-backed Sirajuddin
Haqqani's network, another clear illustration of Pakistan's on-going—if
clandestine—support for the Afghan Taliban and its opposition
to growing Indian influence.
The same might be said for the pressure which
is being exerted on NATO's logistic supply lines through Pakistan,
which until recently Pakistan did little to protect. More cynical
minds might indeed suggest that Pakistan's interests are served
by constraining these supplies, both to weaken NATO and the US
in Afghanistan and to remind the US in particular that Pakistan
presently has its thumb on NATO's jugular, a useful riposte when
Pakistan itself is pressured by the US.
10. US Direct Action in the FATA
At the same time the US has run out of patience
with the Pakistan Army and ISI in relation to Afghan Taliban and
Al-Qaeda safe havens in the FATA and has stepped up air-strikes
and even conducted some ground incursions, most notably on 25
September 2008, when US and Pakistani forces traded gunfire. The
US and NATO might however wonder why the Pakistan army and ISI
are apparently powerless to do anything about the cross-border
movement of the Taliban yet have managed to have troops in place
and willing to fire on every US cross-border ground incursion
to date.
Pakistan has responded very negatively to these developments—
for example shutting off NATO logistics flows through Pakistan
in retaliation for US ground incursions—but it is difficult
to see that the US has much option. From a military perspective
the imperative to act in the FATA in the face of Pakistani obfuscation
seems overwhelming.
However, as the US and NATO are well aware,
the negative impact of these incursions and strikes are enormous
and, inter alia, are fuelling anti-US and anti-western
antipathy in Pakistan, strengthening anti-western sentiments within
the Pakistan Army and ISI, and risking a general tribal uprising
which would complicate issues in the FATA even further. It is
a measure of the perilous state of the war with the Taliban in
Afghanistan that the US clearly feels these risks are outweighed
by the need to take direct action in the FATA.
11. The Surge
As you'll be well aware, the incoming Obama
administration has signalled its intention to support a troop
surge in Afghanistan, following the strategy that has proven successful
in Iraq over the past 18 months, and that General Petraeus has
been moved to the Afghan theatre for that purpose. The success
or failure of this surge is very much going to depend on Pakistan
and on what happens in the FATA and NWFP. Pakistan will not wish
to see the surge succeed for the reasons I have outlined but it
will come under intense pressure from the Obama administration
who is unlikely to be as patient or as indulgent with the Pakistan
military as the Bush administration has been. I expect the Pakistan
Army reaction to the surge to be to very sharp and they are likely
to use every means at their disposal—above all support for
the Afghan Taliban—to defeat it.
This means that the US and NATO has to maximise its
leverage over Pakistan, but before this concludes by thinking
through precisely what that means it is helpful to put two others
issues on the table—Pakistan's nuclear weapons and its role
in the War on Terror—because these are likely to condition
the degree to which Pakistan can be pressured over the next few
years.
12. Nuclear Proliferation and Terrorism
The first issue is the links between Pakistan's
relations with al-Qaeda, Pakistan's use of terrorism as an instrument
of state policy, and what has been termed a "porous"
nuclear weapons context in Pakistan. Many analysts believe that
if there is a nuclear 9/11 carried out in the West, it will have
its origins in Pakistan. I think there are at least two sets of
issues here: one is that unscrupulous technocrats—such as
AQ Khan—from within Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme
could provide assistance to terrorists enabling them to cross
the nuclear threshold. In this connection we already have the
well documented case of two recently retired Pakistani nuclear
weapons scientists—Sultan Mahmood and Chaudiri Majeed, who
met Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan in August 2001. Pakistan has
tried to dismiss this event as of marginal importance and Mahmood
and Majeed as minor figures, but in fact these were senior and
privately radical figures who, although not weapons designers
themselves, were certainly knowledgeable about networks of nuclear
contacts within Pakistan and beyond, and as the AQ Khan story
had illustrated, it is these networks which are of pivotal importance
in terms of nuclear transfer.
The second set of issues arise around the possibility
of direct collusion between terrorists, and Islamists within the
Pakistan military and intelligence services who have access to
nuclear weapons and/or nuclear components. Having myself worked
with Pakistan's SPD on precisely these nuclear safety and security
personnel issues I take the view that these are serious concerns.
Indeed I have published an analysis of these issues and you can
access a shortened version of this paper about Pakistan's command
and control arrangements which includes discussion of these nuclear
terrorism risks, on the PSRU website a link to which you've been
given.
The point is that the Pakistan Army is seen
as pivotal by the US to the safe custody of its nuclear weapons
and to the prevention of nuclear weapons technology reaching terrorist
hands. Pakistan thus has leverage in this domain.
13. The ISI and the WoT I
The second set of issues pertain to the hunt
for al-Qaeda and the War on Terrorism. Two sets of tensions—those
between Pakistan's need to be responsive to the US in particular
and the need to be responsive to the generally anti-western sentiment
at all levels in Pakistan, and those between differing Western
and Pakistan interests in the region—have led to what may
be called the "double narrative" of Pakistan's role
in the WoT. The first of these—the story Pakistan wants
the West to hear—is that Pakistan is an indispensable ally
in the WoT. Certainly in the early years after 9/11 Pakistan did
provide a great deal of support for the WoT, assisting the West
in hunting down many al-Qaeda members, arresting or killing many
senior figures such as Al-Libbi, Ghailiani, Farooqi, Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed and so forth, and closing down many indigenous terrorist
organisations. As we have mentioned Pakistan has also taken heavy
casualties in the tribal areas battling tribal militants.
14. The ISI and the WoT II
The second narrative, however, is that Pakistan has
released many terrorist suspects, allowed many indigenous terrorist
organisations to reform, some under different names, has redeployed
some of these groups to its northern areas and even to Bangladesh
to escape international attention, continues to use terrorists
as instruments of state policy, and that Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri
are still at large and—according to US Undersecretary of
State John Negroponte—that al-Qaeda has reconstituted itself
in Pakistan as the hub of its global operations.
In recent months Pakistani intelligence has provided
more information about al-Qaeda and other foreign terrorists in
the FATA/NWFP and there have been some notable successes, particularly
the deaths of Abu Zubair al-Misri, Azam al-Saudi, Midhat Mursi
al-Sayid Umar and Mustafa Abu-al-Yazid. But this has come only
under intense US pressure and does not detract from the general
duplicity of Pakistan, and the ISI in particular, in the War on
Terror.
15. Criticisms of the ISI
In preparing a paper on the ISI—which
is available if you want to have it—I spoke to security
personnel on both sides of the Atlantic and a pretty consistent
critique of the ISI's role emerged, in particular that:
— the ISI tends to act on US and/or
UK intelligence but not to be proactive in bringing its own intelligence
to the West, and that there are huge gaps in the intelligence
the ISI does provide to the West which Western agencies believe
they are able to fill should they wish;
— the ISI is unhelpful in relation to specific
investigations—most notably of London's 7/7 and 21/7 attacks—where
the trail has gone cold, particularly where those investigated
abut against Pakistani sensitivities such as ISI-constructed terrorist
training camps;
— the ISI has restricted or denied
the US/UK access to many alleged terrorists as well as to many
of its own operatives and assets [key individuals here include
Omar Saeed Sheik implicated in the murder of Daniel Pearl; Dawood
Ibrahim, Pakistan's no 1 gangster/fixer with known connections
to the ISI and al-Qaeda; Rashid Rauf allegedly involved in the
summer 2006 Heathrow bomb plots who miraculously "escaped"
Pakistani custody before he was killed in a US airstrike]; and
— the ISI manipulates intelligence
for its own internal and geopolitical reasons, and misdirects
US and UK intelligence services [eg targets in the tribal areas].
The real point here of course—in relation
to the War in Afghanistan and to the War on Terror—is not
whether Pakistan and its ISI are for us or against us, but rather
whether the benefits the US and NATO derive from the support of
the Pakistan military and ISI are worth the costs and present
and future risks. I take the view that the answer to that question
has changed markedly for the negative over the past few years
and that we can no longer afford a "business as usual"
relationship with the Pakistan military. Not at least while Pakistan
itself is in crisis, while NATO falters in Afghanistan, while
the number of NATO casualties in Afghanistan rises, while the
number of terrorist plots with links to Pakistan continues to
rise, or while the risks of a nuclear terrorist attack with its
origins in Pakistan remains.
16. Policy Constraints
I am under no illusions however about the difficulties
of pressing Pakistan to adjust its policy. Any western initiatives
to force Pakistan to revise policy must face up to at least five
substantial obstacles:
(1) that despite the nominal transition to "democracy"
in Pakistan post February 2008, the Pakistan military remains
in control of defence policy, foreign policy, nuclear policy,
internal security, and will defend their expanded interests in
the Pakistan economy which mushroomed under Musharraf. In the
context of the WoT, and in the context of vast direct US aid to
the Pakistan military this leaves the divided elected government
a pretty small portfolio of issues to squabble about;
(2) that Pakistan has proven extremely resistant
to external sanctions and pressure. Indeed the lessons of the
decade or so of the Pressler sanctions through the 1990s, and
the post-test sanctions in 1998, is that Pakistan will not budge
an inch in the face of such pressure and that the solutions it
seeks to circumvent those pressures have had, if anything, even
more negative consequences for the West;
(3) that we should never lose sight of Pakistan's
capacity for "coercive options", by which I mean its
capacity to deny the West what support it presently offers and/or
to step up support for the Taliban, for terrorists, for proliferation,
and so on. I have myself heard several senior Pakistani diplomats
and military figures make precisely this threat, albeit veiled
in polite language;
(4) that the narrow focus of the Bush administration—and
Cheney's office in particular—over the past seven years
on Musharraf and the Pakistan Army has greatly limited the policy
options and denied the West a broader front of engagement with
Pakistan. Over Musharraf's term democracy has declined in Pakistan
and Islamic extremism and terrorism have flourished. It will not
be easy to find that broader front or to reverse the consequences
of Bush's policy myopia;
(5) that direct US military intervention in Pakistan
is a hugely risky policy option with the potential to inflame
the situation, undermine what western support still exists in
Pakistan, trigger precisely the coercive options Pakistan has
warned of, and perhaps even threaten the existence of Pakistan
itself. I am reminded of Zbigniew Brezinski's recent entreaty
that the US could soon find itself at war in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Iran and Pakistan and, in his words, if it were "that would
spell the end of US hegemony".
February 2009
166 Throughout this paper when I use the term Pakistan
I am referring to the military-political elite which runs the
country, unless otherwise stated. Back
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