Back from the brink | The World Weekly

In 1990, three colonels were inducted into the Pakistani army’s planning cell for Kashmir, the Himalayan territory at the heart of its conflicts with neighbouring India. Tasked with assessing the ramifications of the withdrawal the year before of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, the three men recommended the mujahideen, or holy warriors, returning home after inflicting defeat on the Red Army should be disarmed. They also recommended the militants be prevented from getting involved in – and radicalising – Pakistan’s Kashmir campaign. Their recommendations went ignored and the consequences were catastrophic.

“There were strong voices inside the military against any culpability with terrorists, because it ruined the legitimacy of the Kashmir struggle,” one of the three colonels, Mahmud Shah, tells The World Weekly.

“After all, Pakistan is a regular country, with a military, intelligence services and a diplomatic corps, we concluded,” adds Mr. Shah, who went on to become a provincial chief for the army’s Military Intelligence directorate. “We feared the militants could turn Pakistan into something like Lebanon.”

After retiring as a brigadier, Mr. Shah served as the first ever chief administrator for the seven federally-administered tribal areas (FATA) bordering eastern Afghanistan between 2003 and 2006. It was in that capacity he witnessed, first-hand, the repercussions of the military’s failure to act on the recommendations he and the other two colonels had made in 1990.

Pakistan was at the eye of the geopolitical storm known as the ‘War on Terror’, stirred by al-Qaeda’s September 11, 2001 terrorist strikes on the United States.

By 2004, Pakistani militants, who had adopted the Taliban branding of their Afghan colleagues, had inflicted a humiliating defeat on the military in the South Waziristan tribal area – the first of many in the FATA.

The other six tribal areas fell like dominoes and, in 2007, scores of FATA-based militant factions united under the banner of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Pakistani Taliban Movement, and launched a full-blooded rebellion.

By 2009, the TTP had expanded its territory into the adjacent settled province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, defeating government security forces in the picturesque valley of Swat.

Subsequently, it unleashed a reign of terror that was documented, in part, by teenage schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai, who subsequently shared the Nobel Peace Prize for her courageous defiance.

Emboldened by the provincial government’s surrender of Swat, the Taliban crept eastward toward the capital, Islamabad, a six-hour drive away. Alarmed, the West feared the government and Pakistan’s arsenal of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles would fall to the TTP – and through them into al-Qaeda’s hands.

Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal headlined talks at the White House on Thursday between President Barack Obama and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The Washington Post’s columnist David Ignatius disclosed recently the US has offered Pakistan a give-and-take deal in support for its desire to gain membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which would amount to international recognition of Pakistan as a responsible nuclear weapons state. In return, Pakistan has been asked to consider capping its production of nuclear warheads and the range of its ballistic missile fleet, and to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. That will not happen in the foreseeable future, at least, because Pakistan and its neighbouring adversary India are engaged in a race to achieve ‘full spectrum’ capability to deliver nuclear warheads via air, land and sea-based platforms. Both countries developed the capability to launch nuclear warheads from warplanes before they conducted tit-for-tat nuclear weapons tests in May 1998 and have since mastered medium-range (1,500-3,000km) ballistic missile technology. India is currently testing its first ‘boomer’ – a nuclear-powered, nuclear armed submarine – and is on the verge of completing its tripartite spectrum. Pakistan has sought the same technology from China, its closest ally and India’s major competitor for influence in South Asia. India will become the first country since the 1960s height of the Cold War to have completed the spectrum of nuclear delivery platforms. Pakistan has also mastered tactical nuclear weapons technology: short-range missiles fired with the objective of obliterating an Indian occupation force in case it were to seize a parcel of Pakistani territory during a war and use it as political leverage. Since attaining independence from British colonial rule in August 1947, the South Asian foes have fought two full-fledged wars and four regionalised conflicts, mostly over the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir (part of which is also claimed by China). Between them, India and Pakistan are believed to currently possess more than 200 nuclear warheads. Their arsenals are now larger than Britain’s and France’s, and about the same estimated size as Israel’s.

Spurred into action, Pakistan’s vast military took back Swat and most of the tribal areas, but its hesitation to move on North Waziristan, where al-Qaeda militants lived under the protection of the Afghan Taliban faction, the Haqqani Network, brought it under growing pressure from the US to “do more”.

President Barack Obama, reporting to Congress in 2010, described North Waziristan as “the epicentre of global terrorism”.

Five years on, the picture has vastly changed. Pakistan’s military controls FATA, while the Shawal Valley in North Waziristan, the last pocket of TTP-held territory in the country, is currently the focus of attention for the 170,000 soldiers deployed to the tribal areas since June 2014, with the active support of air force jets and army helicopter gunships.

The counter-insurgent offensive has been pursued with similar gusto in Karachi, Pakistan’s southern port metropolis of 20 million people, where the TTP had established its national urban centre of operations in anticipation of the military’s move on North Waziristan.

The operations have been carried out on the basis of intelligence provided by the military’s premier security agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, which has succeeded in destroying the insurgents’ command-and-control structure, and has throttled their criminal, extortion and other funding networks.

Elsewhere in the country, the government has cracked down on extremist Sunni militants and their supporters in the politicised clergy, enforcing new laws against hate speech targeting Pakistan’s Shia Muslim community, which makes up roughly 20% of the population.

The territorial phase of Pakistan’s militant insurgency is almost over and forces currently deployed in the FATA will stay there until 2019 to guard against an insurgent resurgence.

However, the war against terrorism is far from over. Deprived of territory, the TTP and its al-Qaeda allies continue to target military officials, civilian politicians and the Shia community with suicide and roadside bomb attacks.

Most have not targeted the general public, largely because of a paucity of TTP resources and the negative propaganda value of such indiscriminate killing, but such attacks continue but are not claimed by the insurgents. In the latest such attack, at least 11 labourers commuting home in the western city of Quetta died late on Tuesday when a bomb exploded on the roof of their bus.

Nonetheless, the number of civilian deaths from terrorism acts has dramatically decreased since the military launched its massive counter-offensive in North Waziristan. The annual civilian casualty toll ranged from 2,000 to 3,000 between 2008 and 2013, but fell to less than 1,800 in 2014 and is on course to drop to around 1,000 deaths this year.

The government hopes to virtually eliminate the threat of terrorist attacks by the end of 2016, but that ambitious target is unlikely to be achieved because of the relocation of TTP insurgents to bases inside Afghanistan.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is cognisant the country remains under threat from the TTP and its al-Qaeda cohorts, but has boasted that Pakistan is the only country to have faced and defeated a militant Islamist uprising, and had done so without foreign military support.

An avoidable war

The victory has come at a very steep price: More than 70,000 people have been killed, the economy has suffered estimated losses of $107 billion, and Pakistan has become one of the most notorious countries in the world – an image it is desperately trying to shed, but without much success.

Yet the whole war could easily have been averted in 1990, had the recommendations of the three-colonel task force been acted upon, Mr. Shah said.

Instead, hardliners in the Pakistani military, led by the ISI chief Lieutenant-General Hameed Gul, advocated a vision of “strategic depth” against India rooted in the control of Afghanistan. It involved backing certain former mujahidin groups in the very messy civil war that had erupted in Afghanistan after the Soviets withdrew. In turn, the mujahidin were heavily invested in Pakistani militant groups fighting Indian forces in Kashmir.

To make up for the lack of conventional resources for the covert campaigns in Kashmir and Afghanistan, the militant groups recruited untold thousands of youngsters from Pakistan – many from religious seminaries, where impoverished families sent their sons, and often from state schools and colleges. They were radicalised at seminaries run by proxies of the state and trained at camps, often by foreign militants linked to the emerging al-Qaeda. The recruits’ relations with the army were reinforced through joint training sessions with newly commissioned officers.

This led to the radicalisation of the army’s ranks and, between 1993 and 1996, the then Pakistani army chief of staff, General Waheed Kakar “shunted out about 50% of ISI officers dealing with the Afghan mujahidin”, Mr. Shah says.

Such piecemeal efforts proved to be ineffective because many within the military had fallen prey to the militant religiosity it used to pursue its strategic ends. In 1998, the army’s in-house publication, Hilal, even criticised the next chief of staff, General Jehangir Karamat, for his poor religious observance.

A retired ISI brigadier, speaking to The World Weekly on condition of anonymity, says soldiers of all ranks were subjected to regular sermons by extremist clerics, who cherry-picked verses from the Quran and other Islamic texts to justify their characterisation of the state’s policy as a divine mission and its opponents as enemies of God.

“It wasn’t until I retired and had the time to study the Quran and other religious texts that I discovered what we had been taught while in the army was a corruption of Islam,” he says.

The next army chief of staff, General Pervez Musharraf, also not known for his piety, employed the militants to covertly seize the strategic Kargil Heights of Kashmir in the spring of 1999, sparking a localised conflict in which Pakistani soldiers and militants fought shoulder-to-shoulder against the Indian security forces.

The war was launched without the knowledge of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, then in his second term in office (he won a third term in May 2013), demonstrating that the writ of the state had been stolen by the military and militant non-state actors.

9/11

The episode started a political power struggle that ended in October 1999 with General Musharraf staging a coup d’état and it was he who was confronted with the US’ ‘you’re either with us or against us’ ultimatum after the 9/11 attacks – a threat backed up by four aircraft carrier groups gathered in the Arabian Sea, a few hundred kilometres off Pakistan’s coast. He called a meeting of his junta to seek their opinion: should Pakistan accept or reject the US demand to abandon the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies?

The vice chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Muzaffar Usmani, and ISI director general, Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed, were the prominent voices in favour of defying the US, according to information leaked at the time by aides of Mr. Musharraf.

The two generals had been key players in the coup that brought Mr. Musharraf to power, so he asked the Pakistan Air Force chief of staff, Air Chief Marshal Mushaf Ali Mir, to join the meeting.

“He was asked how long the air force could hold off the Americans,” an erstwhile Musharraf aide tells The World Weekly, on condition of anonymity. “The air chief’s response was: ‘In three hours, there won’t be a Pakistan Air Force anymore’.”

And so the Musharraf regime launched a propaganda campaign that lamented the Taliban’s stubborn refusal to give up Osama bin Laden and justified the junta’s decision to side with the US on the grounds “Pakistan comes first” – a slogan thought up by communications minister Javed Ashraf Qazi who, as ISI chief, had carried out the urge ordered by General Kakar.

Despite General Musharraf’s abandonment of the Taliban, he did not discontinue the state’s relationship with the militants until 2002, when the US intervened to prevent India launching a war in retaliation for Pakistani militant attacks on its parliament and a military camp in Kashmir that housed army officers’ families.

Khaled Ahmed, a renowned author and newspaper editor, said the indoctrination of the Pakistani military in the 1990s created a “predominance of the warrior mind”.

“It is based on a state of honour, not wisdom, and ultimately the only thing you can achieve is martyrdom,” he tells The World Weekly.

As such, the Pakistani military was so slow to respond decisively to the threat posed by jihadis.

“There was simply no desire to fight and kill ‘fellow Muslims’ – despite their predilection to kill other Muslims,” a retired ISI colonel tells The World Weekly, also on condition of anonymity. “It was never about the ability of Pakistan’s military to defeat them. It was about political will.”

The Bin Laden post mortem

The Pakistani state’s history of complicity with militant Islamists came home to roost on May 2, 2011, when US Navy SEALs in stealth helicopters swooped on the garrison town of Abbottabad, a two-hour drive north from Islamabad, and killed al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.

The day after, the three task-force colonels gathered to confer. The group’s leader, General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, was now the army’s chief of staff and, without doubt, the most powerful man in Pakistan. Another in attendance was General Tariq Majid, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Pakistan’s military has ruled the country for about half its 68-year history. The first military coup was was staged in 1958 by army chief of staff, Ayub Khan, who launched the 1965 war with India in an attempt to seize the half of Kashmir administered by India. Instead, Pakistan almost succumbed to an invasion by some 400 tanks, at the time the largest armoured assault in history. Amid massive protests, he was forced to step down as president in 1969 by Yahya Khan, who had replaced him as army chief. Under his leadership, Pakistan lost its eastern wing, modern-day Bangladesh, during a 1971 war with India, and he stepped down upon defeat in December that year. The next junta leader was Zia-ul-Haq, who introduced rigid interpretations of Islamic law after seizing power in 1977, both to crack down against the democratic politicians and media opposed to his rule, and to encourage support for the mujahidin fighting against Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan. By the time of his death in August 1988, in a mysterious airplane crash, General Zia (as he was commonly known) had established jihad as an important means of pursuing the military’s political objectives. Between 1988 and the October 1999 coup d’etat staged by General Pervez Musharraf, four democratic governments were overthrown by conspiracies against them launched by the army’s leadership and opposition politicians. None of the four elected administrations ( ed by the late Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, alternately) that took power in that 11-year period lasted more than two of their mandated five-year terms in office. That cycle ended when General Musharraf returned power to the civilians after a February 2008 general election, because of a 2007 agreement, named the ‘Charter of Democracy’, signed by Mr. Sharif, Ms. Bhutto and other leading politicians. In it, they agreed not to conspire against each other and to allow elected governments to serve their full five-year term in office. Those reforms were enshrined in the constitution in 2009, but General Musharraf’s successors as army chief of staff, General Kayani and General Raheel Sharif, the incumbent, have plotted and politicked to weaken the two governments to have since been elected, ensuring the military’s continuing dominance of key decision making. Subsequently, visiting foreign dignitaries pay their respects to two power centres when visiting Pakistan. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his cabinet are the official face of the state, and receive state guests first, but they usually travel to army headquarters to meet with the chief of staff and ISI director general to conduct the substantial part of their negotiations.

“It was a huge embarrassment,” said Mr. Shah, the only one of three who had retired since 1990. “I could see from the chief’s body language he was shocked.”

During the subsequent discussion, ISI director-general Lieutenant-General Ahmad Shuja Pasha came under fire for his agency’s failure to detect the al-Qaeda chief’s home, located less than 1km from Pakistan’s top military academy.

In the 36 hours that had elapsed since Bin Laden was killed, the ISI had discovered Bin Laden’s presence had been hidden from them by Harakat-ul-Mujahideen and Jaish-i-Mohammed, two Kashmir-focused militant groups who had operated training camps near Abbottabad since the 1990s.

But after much argument, General Kayani decided against cracking down on the groups.

“It was decided we couldn’t open all fronts and the groups would be wound down over time,” Mr. Shah says.

Instead of accepting responsibility for the ISI’s massive failure to detect the al-Qaeda founder, the military used its considerable influence to manipulate the media narrative against the administration of President Asif Ali Zardari, which had sought to distance itself from the entire episode.

A Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, was arrested a few weeks after Bin Laden’s assassination for allegedly conducting a hepatitis vaccination programme, falsely under the auspices of Save the Children, to collect DNA samples in the Abbottabad area for the CIA as it closed in on the al-Qaeda chief.

Although Dr. Afridi had failed to find his target, the military used the arrest to reignite a simmering controversy over a $7.5 billion, five-year civilian aid package to Pakistan approved in November 2009. The military’s many voices in the Pakistani media and opposition political parties had characterised the programme as a conspiracy to infiltrate CIA operatives and military contractors into Pakistan – a complete falsehood, considering the CIA had been given free rein by General Musharraf.

President Asif Ali Zardari and his close aide, Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the US, were branded traitors by a political bandwagon given credibility by the country’s activist Supreme Court chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry.

‘Rigged’ elections

That false narrative continued into the campaign for the May 2013 general election.

The TTP warned it would target Mr. Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the regional parties that made up his left-of-centre coalition administration. As Mr. Zardari’s relationship with the military was anything but cordial, the threat effectively ended the PPP’s campaign before it could begin – a fact lost upon much of the electorate because of the sheer unpopularity of the outgoing government.

In the absence of a clear state narrative against the TTP, the majority of Pakistanis polled annually by the US-based Pew Research Centre still believed their country was fighting America’s post-9/11 war, not one for its own survival, and most favoured a negotiated settlement with the militant insurgents. Polls conducted between 2010 and 2012 found only 34-37% of Pakistanis considered the TTP to be a “very serious threat”. In stark contrast, 53-57% said India was a bigger threat to the country. On the eve of Pakistan’s May 2013 general election, the number of Pakistanis who felt threatened by the TTP rose significantly to 49% - still less than the 52% who feared India more. A July 2014 poll, conducted after the military launched a decisive counteroffensive in North Waziristan, showed 66% of Pakistanis were worried about religious extremism, but in a subsequent August poll, only one-in-four Pakistanis considered the TTP a bigger threat than India. Accordingly, Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League and Imran Khan, head of the Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf (Movement for Justice), promised to engage the TTP in peace talks if elected to power. The TTP approved and guaranteed it would not target their election campaigns.

Mr. Sharif’s party won by a big majority and in June 2013, he became prime minister for the third time, 13 years after being unceremoniously ousted by General Musharraf. Despite the urging of army chief of staff General Kayani, Mr. Sharif pressed ahead with his political agenda, appointing intelligence operatives and extremist clerics from the jihadi heydays of the 1990s as interlocutors.

As they had in 2009, when the government surrendered in Swat, the TTP saw this as a sign of weakness and sought to increase its leverage by staging a series of high profile attacks, mostly against military targets.

Meanwhile, a new army chief of staff, General Raheel Sharif, settled into his job. A relative unknown who had not held an active field command during the counteroffensive against the TTP, it was widely believed he was picked by Prime Minister Sharif (they are not relatives) because of his pedigree: his uncle and brother died as national heroes during Pakistan’s 1965 and 1971 wars against India, and that made him a unifying figure.

Unlike his predecessor, however, General Sharif soon proved he was no slouch on national security. Amid the political to-and-fro with the Taliban during the first half of 2014, he ordered the military to undertake a strategic review of national security objectives and concluded the time had come to eliminate the existential threat posed by the TTP.

The decision to move against the TTP and its al-Qaeda allies was taken in June 2014, after TTP and al-Qaeda militants attacked Karachi’s international airport. Immediately, General Sharif ordered the air force to unleash the opening barrage of a massive offensive on North Waziristan.

Islamabad-based Western diplomats tell The World Weekly the decision was taken without the prior approval of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. He was informed the day after the first air strikes and did not announce a formal government decision until the day after that.

Mr. Sharif spent the rest of the year fighting for political survival against Mr. Khan’s PTI party which, encouraged by supporters within the military, occupied the government district of Islamabad for months to press demands for fresh elections, based on the unsubstantiated premise the 2013 polls had been rigged in favour of Mr. Sharif’s party by the same activist judiciary that had targeted the outgoing Zardari administration.

His government survived because Mr. Zardari’s party and its allies rallied parliament against what the Wall Street Journal described at the time as a “creeping coup” that, according to Reuters, was backed by at least five of the army’s powerful corps commanders. Defence minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif, a school-friend of the prime minister and father-in-law to his daughter, has since accused ISI director-general Zaheer-ul-Islam, now retired, of conspiring against the government. The minister for climate change, Mushahidullah Khan, subsequently repeated the allegation, and was sacked to placate the military.

Peshawar school massacre

The government’s survival came at the heavy price of Prime Minister Sharif’s surrender of foreign and security policy to the military, but it was not until December 16, 2014 that Pakistan finally united against the TTP.

Pushed out of its FATA strongholds, the TTP had relocated to the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar and from there plotted the single-worst atrocity of the insurgency: an assault on the Army Public School in nearby Peshawar, the provincial capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

Dressed in paramilitary uniforms, the militants evaded soldiers guarding the front of the school by entering the school’s large premises from the rear and split into at least five two-man teams of militants who scoured rooms in the five buildings, shooting students and staff on sight.

The most lethal attack was focused on the school's auditorium, which the militants entered as hundreds of grade eight, nine and 10 students gathered to attend an army workshop on administering first-aid. The school’s principal, Tahira Qazi, the wife of a retired army colonel, shouted at the children to run for their lives and placed herself between the fleeing students and the militants; eventually, Ms. Qazi was cornered in a toilet and killed with a grenade. In at least two classrooms, teachers Saeed Khan and Afsha Ahmed confronted the militants to shield their students; both were doused with petrol and burnt alive.

Subsequently, the militants identified and singled out students whose fathers were soldiers and executed them. By the time they had finished, more than 150 people had been murdered, most of them children.

A spokesman for the Taliban Movement of Pakistan said the army-run school was targeted because "we want them to feel the pain of how terrible it is when your loved ones are killed".

"We are taking this step so that their families should mourn as ours are mourning," Taliban spokesman Mohammed Khorsani said in a written statement.

National sentiment was summed up by the military's chief spokesman, Major-General Asim Bajwa: "Today is one of the saddest days of our history... all of us (Pakistanis) are ashamed that we have in our midst people whose instincts are worse than animals, who have killed innocent children on such a large scale," he told journalists gathered near the school the day after the attack.

In the days that followed, the heads of Pakistani political parties gathered under the stern gaze of General Sharif and were browbeaten into accepting the military’s demand for two years of sweeping powers to end the insurgent threat to the country.

The key phrases of the emergent policy were: “zero tolerance” and “no good or bad Taliban”.

And with that, the Pakistani state’s 25-year affair with militant proxies officially drew to a close.

The Obama administration in August refused to certify to the US Congress that Pakistan had ceased its support to the Haqqani Network, an al-Qaeda-connected faction of the Afghan Taliban known to be close to Pakistan’s military. Subsequently, Pakistan has been denied a portion of US reimbursement of the cost of its counter-terrorism operations. Similarly, India has refused to revive peace talks with Pakistan because of its failure to act against the Lashkar-i-Taiba/Jama’at-ud-Dawah militants responsible for a three-day November 2008 rampage through Mumbai that killed 166 people. As previously reported by The World Weekly, Pakistan had in March quietly closed down the training camps operated by Lashkar-i-Taiba and other militant groups fighting against Indian security forces in Kashmir. It has not prosecuted their leaders, however, because it fears they could join the TTP or al-Qaida - as they did after Pakistan’s policy volte face that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US. Five estranged militants from those groups established the first anti-state militant faction in South Waziristan in 2004, effectively founding the TTP. Pakistan’s relationship with the Haqqani Network is its greatest source of input in Afghan politics, especially since the group’s military operations chief, Sirajuddin Haqqani, was appointed the Taliban’s military commander-in-chief in late July. Conversely, it is that contentious relationship that gave Pakistan the leverage to arrange the first direct peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government in July, at the Murree hill resort near Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. Prime Minister Sharif on Saturday said he had launched a fresh initiative to restart the Afghan peace process, which figured prominently in his meeting with President Obama at the White House on Thursday.