Once again the U.S. government appears to be
taking Pakistani promises about combatting terror at face value.
Less than three months
after President Trump promised in his New Year’s Day tweet that the U.S.
government would not accept “lies and deceit” from Pakistan, some U.S. military
leaders are ready to praise the half-hearted steps Pakistan has taken against
terrorist safe havens. If past experience is any guide, the use of softer
language by American generals in the hope of strengthening military-to-military
ties will only encourage Pakistani generals to assume that their two-track
policy of reassuring Americans of cooperation while maintaining support for
jihadi terrorists is working.
Last
month, CENTCOM Commander General Joseph Votel told a hearing of the U.S. House of
Representatives that he saw “positive indicators” that Pakistan is becoming
more responsive to U.S. concerns about its abiding militant safe havens on its
territory. He qualified his statement by remarking that Islamabad’s actions do
“not yet equal the decisive action that we would like to see them take in terms
of a strategic shift.” But General Votel’s words still sufficed to reassure
Pakistan’s military leaders, who claim that, after several false starts, this
time they really are on the verge of a policy transformation.
Pakistani
media have been reporting that the army chief, General Qamar Bajwa, wants
Pakistan to continue along the path of democracy, end all support and tolerance
for jihadi militancy and terrorism, and develop better relations with
Afghanistan and India. But all evidence on the ground suggests that the “Bajwa Doctrine” is not fundamentally different
from the “Kayani Doctrine,” named after General Ashfaq Kayani who served as
Pakistan’s army chief from 2007 to 2013. And the “Kayani
Doctrine” did not differ in substance from the policies and premises
espoused by military commanders before Kayani, notably General Pervez
Musharraf, who seized power in a military coup in 1999 and ruled Pakistan for
nine years.
The
training and education of Pakistan’s military officers tends to cast their
minds in a similar mold, and that mold remains mostly unaltered by changing
realities around them. Georgetown University’s Professor Christine Fair makes
that point in her 2014 analysis of writings by Pakistan army officers: “Fighting to the End”: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War.
And while
General Bajwa may not want to follow in the footsteps of Pakistan’s long list
of coup-making commanders, he cannot avoid politics even if he wants to, for he
presides over an officer corps that spends more time thinking about politics
than about purely professional matters. (Aqil Shah proves that thesis
methodically in his 2014 empirical study, The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan.)
Notwithstanding
a genuine personal distaste for getting directly embroiled in politics, every
Pakistani commander must give voice to his institution’s views and beliefs,
most of which have remained unaltered since the ascendance in 1951 of General
(later Field Marshal) Ayub Khan as the first indigenous Muslim commander of the
army that Pakistan inherited from the British Raj.
In that
worldview, jihadi terrorists serve as a force multiplier for Pakistan against a
permanently hostile India and an Afghanistan whose sense of history prevents it
from becoming subservient to 70-year old Pakistan, despite the latter’s much
larger population and economy. The only terrorists Pakistan needs to oppose,
according to this template, are the ones who attack inside Pakistan; those that
menace the Americans in Afghanistan or Indians in Jammu and Kashmir are more
than tolerable.
Yet
Pakistan’s generals need the United States and China to help make up for
deficiencies in the nation’s economic performance and as suppliers of military
hardware. Pakistani policy toward China is not particularly problematic, since
a shared suspicion of India makes it Pakistan’s strategic partner—and geography
ordains that this circumstance will not change. The United States, on the other
hand, has scruples that coincide with its interests and so must be treated as a
transactional ally—as well as an ally likely to come and go from the region as
it sees fit. Only with Washington, then, do the generals need to practice their
discipline of duplicity as diplomacy.
Plenty of U.S.
officials have by now caught on to the Pakistani generals’ drill. So a few days
after General Votel’s nod to the Pakistani military, a senior U.S. official had
to clarify that the “United States has not
yet seen Pakistan take significant steps to clamp down on the Afghan Taliban
and the Haqqani network militant groups.” According to this official, Islamabad
had failed to take “the kind of decisive and irreversible action” Washington
had asked for to help with the war in Afghanistan. As for the “positive indicators”
mentioned by General Votel, and later by Defense Secretary James Mattis, the
official saw these as attempts by Pakistan “to appear responsive” to American
requests. The Pakistanis “have done the bare minimum to appear responsive” to
U.S. government requests—the sort of tactical cooperation that has misled
Americans into trusting Pakistan in the past, and that has been a key factor in
prolonging the war in Afghanistan.
In other
words, this has all happened before. In December 2008, for example, then-Chairman
of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, saw a positive
trajectory in relations with the Pakistan military, based on
what seemed like encouraging steps against terrorists and in relation to
Afghanistan. Mullen put his faith in the military-to-military relationship just
as General Votel seems to be doing now, and he engaged in intense interaction
with General Kayani via 26 in-person meetings, punctuated by numerous telephone
conversations.
Kayani
managed to sell Mullen on the idea that change was around the corner in
Pakistan’s policies as well as its military’s thinking. But three years later
Admiral Mullen realized that he had been wasting his time. By the beginning of
2011, Mullen’s frustration with his Pakistani interlocutors spilled over in
public statements. Just days before his retirement in September 2011, Mullen told a Senate Armed Services
Committee hearing that Pakistan’s spy agency had played a direct role in
supporting terrorists who had attacked the American Embassy in Kabul a week
earlier. According to Mullen, “the Haqqani network acts as a veritable arm of
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency,” and “with ISI support, Haqqani
operatives planned and conducted that truck bomb attack, as well as the assault
on our embassy.”
A decade
after Admiral Mullen began his effort to try and change Pakistan’s strategic
calculus, his eventual disappointment should not be replaced by General Votel’s
unqualified optimism. After all, the Pakistan military’s priorities in relation
to Afghanistan have not changed much, nor has its core belief system. So it is
worth remembering that, as of 2013, General Kayani’s approach to Afghanistan
was described as being based on four
pillars: “American troops would have to withdraw from Afghanistan;
reconciliation among Afghan factions is not possible without the ISI; the
Jalalabad-Torkham-Karachi route remains the most viable for withdrawing
American forces; and India cannot be allowed to encircle Pakistan.”
None of
those considerations has changed. The Pakistanis still expect U.S. troops
eventually to withdraw from Afghanistan and seem prepared to leverage their
control of ground and air lines of communication into Afghanistan. Unless the
U.S. and Afghan governments can figure a way to negotiate directly with Taliban
leaders and commanders, the ISI continues to believe in its sway over a future
peace process. The fear of encirclement by India is also embedded in
Pakistan’s national psyche and is maintained with a steady dose of
hyper-nationalist propaganda, this despite the fact that it has since been many
years since Indian attitudes toward Pakistan could justify such a view.
For
Pakistan to move toward a drastic transformation, it is essential that
Pakistanis should have the option to discuss alternative futures for their
country, including views on Afghanistan and India that do not paint them as
permanent threats. Unfortunately, one of the most consistent themes in the
thinking of Pakistan’s generals remains the belief that contending ideas about
Pakistan’s direction threaten Pakistan’s survival and stability. Pluralism and
open debate are not in their mental manuals. They are sure that the army is
better suited than civilian institutions or venal politicians, of which
admittedly there are many, when it comes to defining Pakistan’s national
interest.
Until
signs of change in that thinking appear, American civil and military leaders
should withhold praise for “positive” developments in Pakistan’s terrorism
policies. That praise only postpones Pakistanis’ much-needed reflection over
the faulty worldview that has shaped Pakistan’s flawed policies.
Published on: March
22, 2018
Husain Haqqani is director for South and Central Asia at the Hudson
Institute in Washington, DC. He was Pakistan's Ambassador to the United States
from 2008 to 2011. His forthcoming book is Reimagining Pakistan.
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