Gen. Ayub Khan (2006), Pakistan’s first military ruler, gave an explanation for Afghanistan’s behavior that provides considerable insights into how Pakistani military elites viewed Afghanistan from 1947 onward. According to Ayub, Afghanistan initiated these campaigns and gained confidence in its ability to succeed thanks to
constant Indian propaganda [that] Pakistan could not survive as a separate State. The Afghan rulers believed this to be true and decided to stake a claim to our territory before Pakistan disintegrated. … In this way the idea of an artificial State of Pkhtoonistan [sic] inside our borders was made an issue by the Afghan rulers. … In this claim the Afghans were backed by India whose interests lay in ensuring that in the event of a war with us over Kashmir, the Afghans should open a second front against Pakistan on the North West Frontier. They also reasoned that if they had this understanding with Afghanistan, we would not be able to use the Pathan tribesmen against them. The Indians thought that they would be able to hem us in and embarrass us by a pincer movement (197).
This insight, prevalent among Pakistani defense writers, links Pakistan’s problems with Afghanistan inextricably to its security competition with India (see also F.M. Khan 1963) even though India has never supported the Afghan position on the status of the Durand Line. Thus presumed connivance between India and Afghanistan continues to animate the Pakistan army’s strategic thinking and will likely do so well into the future.
The early rivalry with Afghanistan complicated Pakistan’s already monumental security challenges. Aslam Siddiqi (1958), an official in the Pakistani Bureau of National Reconstruction, explained Pakistan’s predicament thusly: it “inherited almost all the burden of the external land defence of undivided India. This mainly meant the defence of the North-West Frontier where about 80 per cent of the Indian Army was normally stationed. But Pakistan soon discovered that the Indo-Pakistan border was still more dangerous and had to post there the bulk of its army” (73). Equally problematic, whereas the British had been able to draw on the revenue of the entire Raj, Pakistan’s resources were thin.
In some ways, the newly formed Pakistan faced even greater security problems than the British. The boundary between Afghanistan and the Raj was not actively contested, and Afghan leaders could not credibly challenge British rule except by exploiting internal issues. Pakistan, in contrast, quickly became involved in disputes over a high percentage of its borders: Afghanistan was committed to undoing the territorial status quo vis-à-vis Pakistan, while Pakistan itself sought to revise the territorial status quo with India. Moreover, until 1971 Pakistan’s entire eastern wing was surrounded by India. Adding to Pakistan’s security challenges was the enduring conviction among its leadership that India sought to undo Partition and that Afghanistan was only a pawn in India’s grand designs. Pakistani military leaders thus could not delink their concerns about Afghanistan from their fears regarding India, even though India did not publicly support Afghanistan’s revisionist efforts (Haqqani 2005, 162; F.M. Khan 1963).
Part of Pakistan’s apprehensions about Afghan interference across its western border can be attributed to political events prior to Partition. As noted in Chapter 3, the Muslim League struggled to garner support for the party, for Jinnah’s claim to speak for South Asia’s Muslims, and even for the Pakistan movement itself. In fact, many people in the frontier region never signed on to the project of Pakistan. In 1929 the Khudai Khidmatgar (Servants of god), a Pakhtun ethnic movement, emerged under the leadership of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. It was fiercely anticolonial and also uncompromisingly opposed to the Partition of British India and the creation of Pakistan. Viewing the Muslim League as pro-British, Ghaffar allied with the Congress Party. With his help, the party took 15 of 36 seats in the 1937 NWFP provincial elections. (The Muslim League did not win a single seat.) When Ghaffar could no longer ignore the fact that Pakistan was inevitable, he was “completely stunned” and viewed the creation of the new state as an “act of treachery” by the Congress Party (Khan 2003, 77). Ghaffar and his fellow Pakhtun nationalists demanded that the British grant them an independent state as well. The British were unwilling to entertain further division but agreed to hold a plebiscite in the NWFP to decide whether the province would join Pakistan or remain a part of India. The Muslim League, with the support of the British, ran an effective campaign that resulted in an overwhelming vote for joining Pakistan (ibid.).
Nevertheless, given the resistance to Pakistan, overt demands for independence, and even the support for India historically prevalent in the NWFP, Pakistan’s security managers viewed the Pakhtuns as “the most potent internal threat to the state” (Khan 2003, 67). This required Pakistan to craft foreign policies to contend with the external challenges emanating from Afghanistan and domestic policies for its own frontier areas. Its solution was to retain much of the security architecture developed by the British. Pakistan, like the British before it, would variously employ a forward policy, a close border policy, or modifications of both, as dictated by the army’s security perspectives.
A perusal of Pakistan’s several decades of professional military journals attests to the variety of apprehensions Afghanistan provokes within the Pakistan Army. The most prominent concern arises from the direct and indirect security threats posed by the Soviet Union’s increasing presence in Afghanistan. For example, Lt. Col. Shamsul Haq Qazi, in 1964, warned that “rapidly increasingly Russian influence in Afghanistan, [has] brought the two mightiest armies [those of China and the Soviet Union] of the world close to our borders” (19). Abdul Sattar (2007), who served as Pakistan’s foreign minister under Gen. Pervez Musharraf, made a similar observation when he wrote, “On the Pakistan side, too, inherited and inherent factors prejudiced Pakistan against the Soviet Union. The Pakistani administrative elite, nurtured in the British strategic view, suspected that the Soviet state cherished the czarist aim of carving out a land access to the warm waters of the Arabian Sea, and therefore, posed a danger to Pakistan’s security” (34). But while many military authors lamented the growing Soviet influence in Afghanistan, prior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan surprisingly few exposited a direct Soviet military threat to Pakistan. This should not be taken to mean, however, that the Soviet Union did not present major problems for Pakistan’s foreign policy objectives.
Pakistan’s problems with the Soviet Union rose out of Cold War alliances. As will be discussed at greater length in the chapter on US–Pakistan relations, by the mid-1950s Pakistan had become tightly allied with the United States through a series of instruments, including a Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement with the United States (signed in 1954); the Baghdad Pact of 1955, which was renamed the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) after Iraq’s withdrawal; and the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), founded in 1955. Pakistan’s military and civilian leadership was keen to secure US assistance to rebuild its weak military, and such alliances afforded Pakistan ample opportunity and resources to do so. Because the formal purpose of these organizations was to limit communist expansion, Pakistan pretended to accede to that objective, even though it was predominantly interested in enhancing its conventional capabilities vis-à-vis India (Haqqani 2005; M.A. Khan 2006; Kux 2001; Sattar 2007). Ayub, Pakistan’s first military ruler, described Pakistan’s compulsions in this regard in his autobiography, Friends not Masters:
From the day of Independence, Pakistan was involved in a bitter and prolonged struggle for her very existence and survival. By 1954 Pakistan was compelled to align herself with the West in the interests of her security. She became a member of the Baghdad Pact and the South-East Asia Treaty Organization, both of which were suspect in the communist world (M.A. Khan 2006, 136).
In his discussions of Pakistan’s foreign policy in Friends not Masters, Ayub takes considerable pains to prove that Pakistan joined these alliances out of compulsion rather than shared strategic interests with the United States (ibid.).
Despite the popular belief that Ayub was staunchly anticommunist, and despi
te the fact that under his watch the Pakistan Army became tightly enmeshed in anticommunist defense pacts with the United States, his autobiography belies this view in some measure. In fact, he argues that it “should be possible to come to an understanding with the Soviet Union by removing her doubts and misgivings” (about Pakistan’s participation in US-led treaty alliances to counter the spread of communism) because Pakistan “had never been a party to any design against her and our membership of the Pact was dictated solely by the requirements of our security” (M.A. Khan 2006, 138). Ayub conceded, however, that one of the enduring stumbling blocks to normalization was India’s military relationship with the Soviet Union, which was significant despite India’s professions of nonalignment.
The Soviet Union also unnerved Pakistan’s military leadership by supporting Indian and Afghan efforts to undermine Pakistan’s interests in the South Asian region. Siddiqi (1959), making the case for continued US defense assistance, claimed that “Pakistan has faced the full blast of the Soviet warning against “disastrous consequences” [for its military relationship with the United States]” (49). He explained that in December 1955, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev “ ‘awarded’ Kashmir to India” when he stated “that Kashmir is one of the States of the Republic of India, has already been decided by the people of Kashmir” (ibid.). At the same time, Khrushchev also expressed support for “Afghanistan’s policy on the Pushtunistan issue. … [But he also promised that] If Pakistan were to adopt the same independent attitude as for example India, conditions could be provided for the establishment of friendly relations between Pakistan and neighbouring countries” (ibid.). In 1957, the Soviet Union vetoed a UN Security Council Resolution on Kashmir (a move that would become a common feature of Soviet policy toward India and Pakistan at the United Nations).17 Even if the Soviet Union did not directly threaten Pakistan’s interests, Pakistan’s military believed that Moscow’s growing support of Kabul emboldened the Afghan government to take a more hostile line on the border dispute and on the status of Pakhtun territories within Pakistan. But despite Pakistan’s incessant misgivings about Afghanistan and Afghanistan’s own tendency to support anti-state movements in Pakistan, the Afghan government actually supported Pakistan in the 1965 war with India and maintained strict neutrality during the 1971 war between India and Pakistan (Durrani and Khan 2002; Haqqani 2005; Hussain 2005; Sattar 2007).
In December 1971, following the secession of Bangladesh, Pakistan again returned to civilian control under the administration of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, whose government believed that the geostrategic environment had become even more inhospitable for Pakistan and that Pakistan must increasingly look to Iran and even Afghanistan for its defense (Calabrese 1997; Malik 2002). After becoming the president and the first civilian martial law administrator of Pakistan, Bhutto went to Afghanistan, ostensibly to thank his neighbor for its neutrality in the 1971 war. He met with King Zahir Shah and raised his concerns about Afghanistan’s instigation of Pakhtun nationalist activities in Pakistan, but little came of the meeting. Later in 1973 Sardar Mohammad Daoud overthrew Shah, possibly with Soviet backing. Daoud was a staunch advocate of Pakhtunistan and took every opportunity to harass Pakistan about this issue (Tahir-Kheli 1974–1975). His advocacy may have been a cynical effort to mitigate the growing discontent of the various fractious Pakhtun tribes under his governance, whose members increasingly came to resent his progressive agenda. Upon seizing power, Daoud publicly explained that the resolution of Afghanistan’s bilateral disputes with Pakistan depended on a “peaceful and honourable solution to this problem (Pashtunistan) in accordance with the hopes and aspirations of the Pashtun and Baluch people and their leaders” (quoted in Hussain 2005, 78).
Daoud’s focus on Balochistan enraged Pakistan in part because Pakistan was experiencing a full-blown Baloch insurgency at that time. The Pakistanis used lethal force to suppress the insurgency, including helicopter gunship strikes using Cobra attack helicopters it had obtained from the United States. Between 1973 and 1975, Daoud’s government provided Baloch insurgents with sanctuary as well as arms and munitions, and Afghanistan highlighted Pakistan’s use of force in multilateral fora. In November 1974, Daoud wrote to the UN secretary general to criticize Pakistan’s treatment of Baloch and Pakhtuns, which he argued violated both the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Daoud explicitly sought Indian as well as Soviet assistance for its effort to press Pakistan on the question of Pakhtunistan (Hussain 2005).
Even after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in May 1988, Pakistan continued to harbor suspicions about the threats posed by both Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. Lt. Col. Israr Ahmad Ghumman, writing in the Pakistan Army Journal in March 1990, described Pakistan as a small state that simultaneously confronts “multidirectional threats to her security due to her geostrategic importance, national policies and ideological stance. Pakistan remains sandwiched between an expanding ideology and a hegemonic neighbor forcing it to live in a perpetual state of external conflict” (Ghumman 1990, 26). This is consistent with the views of Siddiqi (1960, 44–45):
Pakistan inherited almost all the burden of the external land defense of United India. This mainly meant the defense of the north-west frontier where was normally stationed about eighty percent of the Indian Army. But in December 1947, movements of the Indian armed forces became such a menace to its security that Pakistan withdrew all its forces from the northwest frontier and posted them near the Indo-Pakistan border. So the overall burden of defense [that] Pakistan has got to carry is much heavier than that of United India. … Pakistan has to look ahead in the North and watch the trends there. The first line of defense of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent lies in the Hindu Kush [the mountain range spanning Pakistan and Afghanistan]. …
Several persistent themes provide a backdrop for the Pakistan Army’s beliefs about Afghanistan and the threats emanating from it. First, while Afghanistan’s military may not be able to threaten Pakistan by conventional means, the Pakistan Army has long been convinced that Afghanistan can mobilize the support of hostile international actors—at various times, the Soviet Union, Russia, India, or Iran—to prosecute its hostile policy vis-à-vis Pakistan and that it can directly and indirectly support, or even instigate, antistate activities in Pakistan. Ghumman (1990) captures these sentiments in his 1990 article in the Pakistan Army Journal. He argues that while the Afghan Army could not prosecute an all-out offensive against Pakistan on its own, it could still resort to “increasing acts of violation and punitive strike as she had done in the past” (27). He ties Pakistan’s domestic stability to these external forces, noting that “the delicate internal balance of Pakistan due to law and order, Pakhtoonistan and refugee problems, have the potential of being exploited by external factors through subversion, terrorism and insurgency. … The dissident elements and miscreants can be exploited by Russia, India and Afghanistan in their nefarious designs” (28).
These concerns continue to animate the Pakistan Army’s evaluation of events in Afghanistan since 9/11. Pakistan’s military leadership believes that India has expanded its presence in Afghanistan under the US security umbrella following the US ouster of the Taliban in late 2001. Equally important, Pakistan’s military believes that India and Afghanistan have played a role in undermining Pakistan’s security in Balochistan and in the frontier area, which has been plagued by Islamist insurgency for much of the past decade. In 2011, Col. Dr. Muhammad Khan (2011), who at the time was a faculty member at the prestigious Lahore University of Management Sciences, wrote in the journal Hilal, an official magazine of the Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR):
Indian growing involvement in Afghanistan is yet another concern both at regional and global level. US is acting as a guarantor to the detrimental role of India in the future set up of Afghanistan. In this regards, Indian role in the reconstruction of Afghanistan is projected more than its true volume. Indeed, US is preparing India as its successor state in Afghanistan, in case it lessens its p
resence by 2014, under the strong US public pressure. With each passing day, there is an increase in the Indian role in Afghanistan. For countries like Pakistan, this growing Indian influence in Afghanistan is enhancing its security concerns. Already Indian intelligence set up has created internal instability in FATA and Balochistan. The active Indian presence in Afghanistan is pushing Pakistan for a two front war … (19).
In July 2012, Maj. Asif Jehangir Raja (2012), the editor of Hilal, claimed that Pakistani terrorists were finding safe havens in Afghanistan. Maj. Raja identified the northeastern Afghan province of Kunar as a place that “was quietly being generated to accommodate the run-away terrorists of Swat who had fled the area due to fear of Pakistan Army” (3). He claims that the terrorists have used these sanctuaries to train recruits, hold planning meetings, and safely conduct raids on the Pakistani military. Raja is incredulous that “a group of hundreds, assemble at some place in Afghanistan, carries out a cross border attack, and goes back without being noticed by Afghan and Allied security forces. … The question arises as why the ‘safe havens’ are tolerated (or at least not attacked) on the Afghan side of the border?” (ibid.).
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