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| Imran Khan and General Qamar Bajwa. |
In a momentous decision on July 28, 2017, then Prime Minister
of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif was disqualified from holding public office by the
country’s apex court on the flimsy pretext of holding an “Iqama” (a work
permit) for a Dubai-based company, and was subsequently given a ten-year
imprisonment sentence, though the latter decision is subject to appeal.
Subsequently, sham elections were staged last year, in which
many of the stalwarts of Nawaz Sharif’s political party were sent behind the
bars and the stooge of Pakistan’s military Imran Khan and his newly formed
political party emerged as clear winners, thus legitimizing the “judicial coup”
against the government of Nawaz Sharif.
Although it is generally assumed that the revelations in the
Panama Papers, that Nawaz Sharif and his family members owned offshore
companies, led to the disqualification of the former prime minister, another
critically important factor that contributed to the ouster and incarceration of
Nawaz Sharif is often overlooked.
In October 2016, one of Pakistan’s leading English language
newspapers, Dawn News, published an exclusive
report [1] dubbed as the “Dawn Leaks” in the Pakistani press. In the report
titled “Act against militants or face international isolation,” citing an
advisor to the prime minister, Tariq Fatemi, who was fired from his job for
disclosing the internal deliberations of a high-level meeting to the media, the
author of the report Cyril Almeida contended that in a huddle of Pakistan’s civilian
and military leadership, the civilian government had told the military’s top
brass to withdraw its support from the militant outfits operating in Pakistan,
specifically from the Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad.
After losing tens of thousands of lives to terror attacks
during the last decade, an across-the-board consensus has developed among
Pakistan’s mainstream political forces that the policy of nurturing militants
against regional adversaries has backfired on Pakistan and it risks facing
international isolation due to belligerent policies of Pakistan’s security
establishment.
Not only Washington, but Pakistan’s “all-weather ally”
China, which plans to invest $62 billion in Pakistan via its China-Pakistan
Economic Corridor (CPEC) projects, has also made its reservations public
regarding Pakistan’s continued support to the aforementioned jihadist groups.
Thus, excluding a handful of far-right Islamist political
parties that are funded by the Gulf’s petro-dollars and historically garner
less than 10% votes of Pakistan’s electorate, all the civilian political forces
are in favor of turning a new leaf in Pakistan’s checkered political history by
endorsing the decision of an indiscriminate crackdown on militant outfits
operating in Pakistan. But Pakistan’s security establishment jealously guards
its traditional domain, the security and defense policy of Pakistan, and still
maintains a distinction between the so-called “good and bad” Taliban.
Regarding Pakistan’s duplicitous stance on terrorism, it’s
worth noting that there are three distinct categories of militants operating in
Pakistan: the Afghanistan-focused Pashtun militants; the Kashmir-focused
Punjabi militants; and foreign transnational terrorists, including the Arab
militants of al-Qaeda, the Uzbek insurgents of Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan
(IMU) and the Chinese Uighur jihadists of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement
(ETIM). Compared to tens of thousands of native Pashtun and Punjabi militants,
the foreign transnational terrorists number only in a few hundred and are hence
inconsequential.
Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is mainly comprised
of Pashtun militants, carries out bombings against Pakistan’s state apparatus.
The ethnic factor is critical here. Although the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) like
to couch their rhetoric in religious terms, but it is the difference of
ethnicity and language that enables them to recruit Pashtun tribesmen who are
willing to carry out subversive activities against the Punjabi-dominated state
apparatus, while the Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants have by and large
remained loyal to their patrons in the security agencies of Pakistan.
Although Pakistan’s security establishment has been willing
to conduct military operations against the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), which are
regarded as a security threat to Pakistan’s state apparatus, as far as the
Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants, including the Lashkar-e-Taiba and
Jaish-e-Mohammad, and the Afghanistan-focused Quetta Shura Taliban, including
the Haqqani network, are concerned, they are still enjoying impunity because
such militant groups are regarded as ‘strategic assets’ by Pakistan’s security
agencies.
Therefore, the Nawaz Sharif government’s decision that
Pakistan must act against the jihadist proxies of the security establishment or
risk facing international isolation ruffled the feathers of the military’s top
brass, and consequently, the country’s judiciary was used to disqualify an
elected prime minister in order to browbeat the civilian leadership of
Pakistan.
Historically, from the massacres in Bangladesh in 1971 to
the training and arming of Afghan jihadists during the Soviet-Afghan war
throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, and then mounting ill-conceived military
operations in Pakistan’s tribal areas under American pressure, leading to the
displacement of millions of Pashtun tribesmen, the single biggest issue in
Pakistan’s turbulent politics has been the interference of army in politics.
Unless Pakistanis are able to establish civilian supremacy in Pakistan, it
would become a rogue state which will pose a threat to regional peace and its
own citizenry.
For the half of its seventy-year history, Pakistan was
directly ruled by the army, and for the remaining half, the military
establishment kept dictating Pakistan’s defense and security policy from behind
the scenes. The outcome of Ayub Khan’s first decade-long martial law from 1958
to 1969 was that Bengalis were marginalized and alienated to an extent that it
led to the separation of East Pakistan (Bangladesh) in 1971.
During General Zia’s second decade-long martial law from
1977 to 1988, Pakistan’s military trained and armed its own worst nemesis, the
Afghan and Kashmiri jihadists. And during General Musharraf’s third martial law
from 1999 to 2008, Pakistan’s security establishment made a volte-face under
American pressure and declared a war against its erstwhile jihadist proxies
that kindled the fire of insurgency in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
Although most political commentators in Pakistan nowadays
hold an Islamist General Zia-ul-Haq responsible for the jihadist militancy in
tribal areas, it would be erroneous to assume that nurturing militancy in
Pakistan was the doing of an individual scapegoat named Zia. All the army
chiefs after Zia’s assassination in 1988, including Generals Aslam Beg, Asif
Nawaz, Waheed Kakar, Jahangir Karamat and right up to General Musharraf, upheld
the same military doctrine of using jihadist proxies to destabilize the hostile
neighboring countries, Afghanistan, India and Iran, throughout the 1980s and
‘90s.
A strategic rethink in the Pakistan Army’s top-brass took
place only after the 9/11 terror attack, when Richard Armitage, the US Deputy
Secretary of State during the Bush administration, threatened General Musharraf
in so many words: “We will send Pakistan back to the Stone Age unless you stop
supporting the Taliban.” Thus, deliberate promotion of Islamic radicalism and
militancy in the region was not the doing of an individual general; rather, it
was a well-thought-out military doctrine of a rogue institution.
Notwithstanding, although far from being its diehard
ideologue, Donald Trump has been affiliated with the infamous white supremacist
“alt-right” movement, which regards Islamic terrorism as an existential threat
to America’s security. Trump’s tweets slamming Pakistan for playing a double
game in Afghanistan and providing safe havens to the Afghan Taliban on its soil
reveals his uncompromising and hawkish stance on terrorism.
Many political commentators in the Pakistani media
misinterpreted Trump’s tweets as nothing more than a momentary tantrum of a
fickle US president, who wants to pin the blame of Washington’s failures in
Afghanistan on Pakistan. But along with tweets, the Trump administration also
withheld a tranche of $255 million US assistance to Pakistan, which shows that
it wasn’t just tweets but a carefully considered policy of the new US
administration to persuade Pakistan to toe Washington’s line in Afghanistan.
Furthermore, Washington has also been arm-twisting Islamabad
through the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to do more to
curtail the activities of militants operating from its soil to destabilize the
US-backed government in Afghanistan.
Finally, after Donald Trump’s outbursts against Pakistan,
many willfully blind security and defense analysts suggested that Pakistan
needed to intensify its diplomatic efforts to persuade the Trump administration
that Pakistan was sincere in its fight against terrorism. But diplomacy is not a
charade in which one can persuade one’s interlocutors merely by hollow words
without substantiating the words by tangible actions.
The double game played by Pakistan’s security agencies in
Afghanistan and Kashmir to destabilize its regional adversaries is in plain
sight for everybody to discern and feel indignant about. Therefore, Pakistan
will have to withdraw its support from the Afghan Taliban and the
Kashmir-focused Punjabi militant groups, if it is eager to maintain good
working relations with the Trump administration and wants to avoid economic
sanctions and international censure.
Footnotes:
[1] Act against militants or face international isolation,
civilians tell military:
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