Pakistani accounts of US–Pakistan relations devote considerable space to the 1980s, when the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan worked to eject the Russians from Afghanistan. Pakistani military authors writing about this period typically minimize the benefits Pakistan obtained through its alliance with the United States and at the same time exaggerate the costs this relationship forced Pakistan to bear. These narratives depict Pakistan as a passive pawn of US strategy and often—but not always—omit Saudi Arabia’s massive contributions to the jihad against the Soviets. Most importantly, they leave out any mention of Pakistani involvement in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion and ignore Pakistani attempts to get America involved in Afghanistan even before the Soviets crossed the Amu Darya. These narratives also tend to conflate the Taliban with the mujahideen who fought the Soviets. This allows Pakistani interlocutors to lay a whole host of problems at Washington’s door including typical claims that the Americans created the Taliban and al-Qaeda; that America abandoned Pakistan to a drug, gun, and jihad culture; and that America created Pakistan’s purported madrasa problem. This narrative is most pernicious because it blames the United States for Pakistan’s current Islamist insurgency and turns a blind eye to the role played by decades of Pakistani government support for Islamist proxies.
Col. Muhammad Khan’s 2009 essay for the Pakistan Army Journal provides both a representative sample of this argument and also displays the complex revisionism such narratives may propose. According to Khan, Pakistan’s dalliance with Islamist militancy began with the anti-Soviet jihad. Khan also claims—contrary to a growing body of evidence—that the roots of terrorism and extremism in Pakistan also reach back only to the Afghan war: “the reality is that the roots of the extremism and terrorism in the country are linked with the Western sponsored Jihad against the invasion of former Soviet Union in Afghanistan from 1979–1989” (40–41). This statement not only ignores Bhutto’s aggressive use of militant elements in Afghanistan but also absolves the Saudis, themselves vigorous supporters of the jihad. Khan similarly discounts the possibility that Pakistan solicited American involvement, noting that the “United States needed Pakistan and its soil for launching a proxy war against its rival Communist Soviet Union. Through the consent of Pakistan, [the] US then encouraged feelings of Islamic War” (41). The historical record is quite clear on this point: using jihadist rhetoric was not an American innovation, as the term “mujahideen” had long been used to describe the militant proxies Pakistan deployed in Afghanistan and India.
According to Khan (2009), after the United States had succeeded in ousting the Soviet Union the “US and west left the region in haste leaving behind a jihadists culture” (41). Even more egregiously, Khan informs his readership that the United States not only remained in contact with the Taliban but also was funding the movement (ibid.). Although the United States did have contact with the Taliban, the claims that it made payments to the group are absurd. Yet Khan makes no mention of Pakistan’s extensive contact with and support for the movement. He reluctantly concedes that “misguided Jihadists, Taliban and even so-called Al-Qaeda persons took refuge in FATA of Pakistan” (ibid.). But he makes the bizarre claim that, over the years, the Taliban “were strengthened by acquisition of latest weaponry and equipments and an unending financial support by forces operating from outside the Pakistani borders, having historical rancor against us” (44). (Khan does not need to name India since his meaning would be clear to his audience.) Even more audaciously, he intimates that the militants may not be actual Muslims; rather, “all tangible evidences [sic] and analysis are indeed leading to the coherent conclusions that camouflaged like Muslims, these militants are operating against Islam … indubitably none is follower of Islam or well wisher of Muslims, in general, and Pakistan, in particular” (45).
This article not only absolves Pakistan of any responsibility for the current internal security situation but also externalizes the entire problem of Islamist militancy against the Pakistani state. Khan (2009) claims that the enmity that these militants have toward Pakistan has been
fully exploited by RAW and some other intelligence agencies of the anti-Pakistan forces. These anti-state spying agencies are reinforcing the militants through trained manpower both foreigners and locals by equipping them with the latest and sophisticated weaponry to fight against Pakistani security forces in the attire of religion. They are being trained in Afghanistan and then harboured into Pakistani soil through the abetment of Afghan Government. In order to support the terrorist activities in Pakistan, India has established six consulates and over 50 offices in close proximity of Pakistani frontiers in Afghanistan. Afghan puppet regime and some major powers are said to be assisting Indian activities through the provisioning of finance, training and sophisticated arms and ammunition (48).
To be clear, I do not claim that India is completely innocent of any interference in Pakistan. But Khan’s version of history is dangerous because it excuses Pakistan from any and all responsibility for the problems it faces and perpetuates the belief that an anti-Pakistan alliance seeks to destroy the state. Khan insists that Pakistan, now a battlefield, was once a country at peace with itself and with its neighbors. “It is beyond doubt that Pakistan is suffering, mainly because of its historical alliance with [sic] US and West whose policies and actions against Muslims have created the so-called Islamic militants in Pakistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world” (45).
In recent years, writers in Pakistan’s defense publications have begun to contend that the United States is deliberately seeking to destroy Pakistan or is even aiding and abetting the Pakistani Taliban in its operations against Pakistan’s armed forces, police, political leadership, and ordinary civilians. For example, Maj. Gen. A. S. Bajwa (2012) argues that attackers under the command of Maulana Fazlullah (a wanted terrorist of Swat) regularly raid Pakistan from safe havens in Kunar, Afghanistan. He claims that “it is not believable that a group of hundreds, assemble at some place in Afghanistan, carries out a cross border attacks, and goes back without being noticed by Afghan and Allied security forces. The Americans’ claim and complain that there are ‘safe havens’ for terrorist groups here in Pakistan, but the same can also be claimed about those who attack Pakistani territory from Afghanistan and then return to their sanctuaries” (3).
Pakistani defense commentators who fear that the United States is seeking to harm Pakistan and its interests were galvanized by the American/North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) attack on a Pakistani outpost in Salala in November 2011. United States and NATO forces made a series of deadly mistakes that resulted in the deaths of nearly two dozen Pakistan military personnel. The United States refused to apologize, inflaming Pakistani sensibilities and inadvertently providing support for the claim that the United States had attacked the Pakistanis in retaliation for Pakistan’s supposed assistance to the Afghan Taliban. In February 2012, Ahmad Rashid Malik, writing in Hilal, cited Pakistan’s director general of military operations, Maj. Gen. Ashfaq Nadeem, who told Pakistan’s Senate Standing Committee on Defense that the attack was “deliberate and pre-planned and was conducted by US Special Forces, over which NATO has no control inside Afghanistan” (11, emphasis in original). The Salala check post incident became a rallying cry for many in Pakistan. Malik, for example, called it “the most critical outcome of the decade-long US war in Afghanistan. During this war, over 30,000 [Pakistani] civilians have sacrificed their lives in drone attacks, suicidal bombings, and sabotage activities. Over 3,000 Pakistani soldiers have embraced martyrdom and thousands more have been injured during the war on terror. The financial losses have been estimated [to be] over US $80 billion in addition to the total ruining of road infrastructure by NATO logistic supply from Karachi to Chaman and Torkham” (11–12). These arguments are adduced to counter American claims that Pakistan has been amply rewarded for its selective cooperation with the United States and growing anti-Pakistan feeling within the US government.
MAKING EXCUSES FOR C
HINA
In its early years the Pakistan Army Journal, which began publishing in 1958, carried a few articles expressing skepticism of Communist China (a sentiment shared by then army chief Ayub). In the journal’s first volume, for instance, Maj. Wasiuddin Ahmad (1958) warned of the dangerous spread of Chinese communism, which “not only laid the foundations of a new Chinese empire in Southeast Asia but also led to the introduction of the powerful ideology of Communism, in its most vicious form. … The vacuum, thus created by the withdrawal of Western influence, is being filled by limitless Communism” (55).
But Ahmad’s (1958) perspective would prove exceedingly rare over the course of the decades of literature read during the course of this research. Since the 1960s, Pakistani military authors are far more likely to treat China as a more reliable partner than the United States. Maj. Muhammad Aslam Zuberi’s (1971) article for the Pakistan Army Journal offers more typical fare. Reflecting the growing concerns over India’s nuclear aspirations and the possibility that a nuclear India would “claim the right for leadership” throughout South Asia and the rest of noncommunist Asia and Africa, Zuberi calls for Pakistan to develop a independent nuclear deterrence (23). He takes care to note that he does not suggest “matching India bomb for bomb or missile for missile” and instead advocates for the “concept of minimum deterrent [that] has been successfully preached by Britain and France” (ibid.). Because Pakistan will not soon be able to afford a minimum deterrent on its own, Pakistan should pursue nuclear collaboration, most likely with China. China, he argues, is anxious for friends and may want to “retain its friendship with Pakistan and help it” (25). By way of contrast, Zuberi raises another alternative: pursuing a security guarantee from the United States. He immediately rejects this option, rehearsing the “failure of the United States to aid Pakistan in her war with India during 1965 in spite of a Mutual Defence Aid Pact” (26). He considers requesting the Soviet Union for help but acknowledges that it has no reason to extend its nuclear umbrella, especially given its ties to India. Zuberi concludes that a nuclear guarantee from China or some other form of nuclear assistance from China is the safest course for Pakistan.
For many authors, China and Pakistan are the twinned victims of American machinations. As early as 1995, Pakistani defense writers fret that the United States is “determined to assign an important role to India, ostensibly with the aim of neutralising the strength of Chinese and also decimating all the power potential of Pakistan …” (Sarwar 1995, 64). What’s more, “America is deliberately conniving at India’s belligerent posture … [and] exerting undue pressure on Pakistan thus endangering its security interests” (ibid.). In light of India’s nuclear explosion in 1974 and India’s “recurrent use of force to impose solutions,” Pakistan has had no choice but to seek a nuclear weapons capability, relying on all available sources of help (64–65).
Sarwar (1995) acknowledges that China has at times worked with the United States and against Pakistan’s interests, especially with regards to Kashmir, where both China and the United States support a bilateral settlement that would avoid referring the matter to the United Nations (Pakistan’s preferred outcome). Yet he insists that a Chinese–Indian rapprochement does not come at the expense of Islamabad. In other words, while US engagement of India is seen as zero-sum with respect to Pakistan, and Pakistani officials do not hesitate to denounce US–India engagement, China’s rapprochement with India is treated as relatively benign. Increased Chinese (and Iranian) ties to India do not worry Sarwar since both remain supportive of Pakistan’s position vis-à-vis India—even if they muffle their sentiments out of deference to Indian equities. While Sarwar concedes that both China and Iran refrain from “mentioning the UN resolutions on Kashmir or the right of self-determination of the Kashmiri people” (73), this discussion of China’s policies lacks the rancorous tone and invective that Pakistan’s defense writers reserve for the United States. Whereas Pakistan’s defense writers go to great lengths to emphasize American deceit, they go to equal lengths to either ignore or downplay China’s own shortcomings. Oddly, Pakistanis have even taken in stride China’s admonition about the presence of Islamist Uighers who have received military training in Pakistan. According to China Daily, these militants learned how to make explosives and use firearms in training camps in Pakistan run by the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (Wei et al. 2011). Whereas Pakistan routinely bristles at American demands to do more against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Pakistan typically responds with alacrity in operating against the Uighers (Perlez 2011).
Conclusions and Implications
At first blush, the narratives repeated in Pakistani defense writings on its allegedly sordid mistreatment by the United States appear to be a curious strategy for managing domestic perceptions of the army. After all, the tales of American schemes to exploit the vulnerable army makes the military appear to be little more than a puppet of the United States. And this is indeed how the army’s domestic constituents sometimes view it. When public opinion turns against it, the army works assiduously to rehabilitate its image, not infrequently by accentuating its own weakness and cultivating sympathy for the institution. In the aftermath of the unilateral US raid on a Pakistani cantonment town that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden, the army’s strategy was to play up the enormous technological gaps between the hegemonic, bullying American army and Pakistan’s force. This approach was successful: Pakistanis generally blamed the Americans for the fiasco and set aside public demands to understand why bin Laden was in a cantonment town for so many years and why Pakistan’s security and intelligence agencies had failed to find him first.
Because the Pakistan Army is a political force, it cares about maintaining a positive image among Pakistanis, and it has evolved numerous methods of manipulating its country’s varied media to achieve this goal. In the past, pressure was exerted through the Ministry of Information, but in recent years ISI has established its own media cell tasked not only with monitoring international and domestic reporting about Pakistan but also with reaching out to and actively managing reporters. The military’s Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) works to ensure that “right wing polemicists and preachers” who promote the army’s preferred narratives are invited on talk shows to discuss Pakistan’s “national security, its foreign policy and the prevailing ideology of the state and the society” (Farooq 2012a, 40). In addition, the army has long influenced Pakistan’s textbooks, in which the army appears as the institution best able to handle any crisis (Farooq 2012a, 2012b; Kohari 2012; Sabri 2012). These tools ensure not only that the army can control its image at home but also that its preferred narratives about its partners are shared by institutions well beyond the military.5
Perhaps the most important implication of these highly stylized narratives of Pakistan’s relations with the United States and China is the rent seeking they enable. By leveraging distorted narratives of the past, aggrandizing the relevance of Pakistan to US national security interests, and threatening to supplicate China or more unscrupulous partners should the United States demure, Pakistan successfully wrests expansive military, economic, and other assistance from the United States. The United States does usually get something from these transactions (e.g., ability to launch U-2 flights or more recently drones, logistical support for operations in Afghanistan), but it is far from obvious that the benefits have been worth the costs paid, particularly when the transactions permit Pakistan to further invest in programs that undermine US interests (nuclear proliferation, sustained support for Islamist proxies).
Such rent seeking has been a fundamental and enduring component of the army’s strategy in engaging with the United States. As Schaffer and Schaffer (2011) note, these selectively structured narratives have permeated Pakistan’s political and bureaucratic organs, and there are virtually no differences among the ways these different state organs utilize them, particularly when engaging with the United States. Fundamentally, information asymmetries allow Pakistan’s strategy to succ
eed. Whereas Pakistani officials—in and out of uniform—know their brief, their American counterparts are more often than not ingénues lacking even a rudimentary understanding of Pakistan’s history or that of US–Pakistan relations. In contrast to poorly prepared Americans who engage Pakistanis, Pakistani negotiating partners are able to call on a rich and extensive, though selective, narrative of American perfidy to bamboozle their American interlocutors, many of whom have been dealing with Pakistan for only a brief time.
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