A Pakistani dilemma, Paul Rogers

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 17:00:07 +0000

Pakistan is in ferment. Pervez Musharraf, the general-president, insists that national stability transcends democracy, and that he is still the man to guarantee it. Musharraf's term as head of state expired on 14 November 2007, though it has effectively been extended by his declaration of an emergency on 3 November. His formation of a caretaker government on 15 November - at a time when he is facing increasing criticism from the United States - is paralleled by direct telephone contact between the two main opposition leaders and rivals, Benazir Bhutto (currently under house-arrest for the second time in a week) and Nawaz Sharif (in Saudi Arabia and prevented from returning to Pakistan). As the different power-centres seek to consolidate their positions, a quick or easy way out is hard to glimpse (see Irfan Husain, "Pakistan's multi-faceted crisis", 12 November 2007).

The deepening crisis in Pakistan is evolving in a way very different from Washington's expectations. The not-so-covert plan for one of the United States's key allies in the "war on terror" had been to manoeuvre Musharraf and Bhutto into an accommodation whereby they could divide the political spoils between them while ensuring the state's stability; Musharraf would remain president and retain the powers of that office, Bhutto would become prime minister (in a top-down choice confirmed by a subsequent election) and provide the semblance of democracy.

Power's dependence

It started to unravel almost as soon as Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan on 18 October 2007 to be met by an assassination attempt. It continued with the resistance of Pakistan's lawyers and much of its civil society to Musharraf's attempt to ensure that his re-election on 6 October was ratified by the supreme court. As doubts (and hopes) accumulated that the court - whose chief justice had been suspended by Musharraf in March 2007, a decision the court subsequently overturned - would rule against the president, he decided to pre-empt its decision by his declaration of an emergency.

Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 26 September 2001

Musharraf himself ascribed his decision to the need for national unity in face of several security challenges, thus claiming the motivation of principle rather than crude political calculation. From her own side, Bhutto has had to balance a number of factors: the need to display respect for democratic formalities, her own hunger for power, the mood of her supporters, and the constant input of the United States in the evolving events; by 13 November, aware of the way the wind was blowing, she abandoned Musharraf by calling for his resignation and describing him as an "obstacle" to a political settlement.

The clear result of these developments is the end - in the short term at least - of Washington's hopes for a regime that would allow it to expand military action against radical Islamist militias in western Pakistan.

But the plan's failure notwithstanding, the US cannot merely abandon Musharraf (at least without ensuring a smooth succession that would protect its interests) as he represents two great assets: he remains in control of the army, the only force capable of acting against the rebels in western Pakistan; and he is a guarantee that lines of communication from Karachi through Pakistan to eastern Afghanistan will remain open.

The latter point - less obvious but at least as crucial as the former - is Musharraf's trump-card. The US armed forces compose more than half of the nearly 50,000 foreign forces now in Afghanistan, and most of their supplies are carried by land via Karachi across Pakistan; the Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said on 14 November that Pakistan is the transit-route for around 75% of all supplies to US troops in Afghanistan, including roughly 40% of the fuel they use (see "U.S. seeking alternatives to Pakistan routes for Afghanistan war supplies", Xinhua, 14 November 2007). The other available routes into Afghanistan all present problems (the three central Asian republics to Afghanistan's north - Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan - are landlocked, and using them would require logistically difficult operations involving the eastern Black Sea states, and perhaps even Kazakhstan and/or Russia).

In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click here

Paul Rogers's latest book is Global Security and the War on Terror: Elite Power and the Illusion of Control (Routledge, July 2007). This is a collection of papers and essays written over the last twenty years, with two new essays on the current global predicament

There is in principle an easier route for large-volume goods from the Indian Ocean coast, but is out of the question since it passes through Iran. Pakistan really is central to the US's military effort in the region, and this makes a stable pro-American government in Islamabad essential both to confront the rebels within Pakistan itself and to conduct the war against the Taliban and other militias in Afghanistan.

The state of emergency in Pakistan has already begun to compromise its own army's contribution, insofar as so many resources are being diverted towards securing public order (see Ayesha Siddiqa, "Pakistan: the power of the gun", 7 November 2007). In addition, even as militia control is consolidated in regions such as North and South Waziristan, hardline Islamists are winning local battles even in the scenic tourist district of Swat which is a good distance from the Afghan border (see Griff Witte & Imtiaz Ali, "Musharraf's Army Losing Ground in Insurgent Areas", Washington Post, 13 November 2007).

There, local militias following a young cleric, Maulana Fazlullah, are now building on their seizure of police stations to extend their authority across a substantial area containing several towns and villages. This more resembles local insurgency than hit-and-run attacks.

The Pakistani army has since late October been attempting to subdue the militants' challenge in Swat; reports on 14 November suggest that it had killed between sixteen and thirty-three militants in its latest operation in the northwest of the valley the previous day. It is far from clear, however, that the army will prove capable of quelling the militia advance and the wider movement it represents.

Two factors suggest that its effort in this respect will face problems. The first is that the Pakistani army is very much a conventional institution whose main strategic doctrine is directed at countering India's much stronger military forces; consequently, it lacks expertise in counterinsurgency operations. Second, Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency has long been involved in training guerrilla fighters for actions in disputed Kashmir, but many of those people have now relocated to western Pakistan where they form a significant part of the local rebel forces.

A new programme

In response to this new configuration, the United States military is about to embark on a major expansion of its work with the Pakistani army in order to make it more effective. The aim is to improve its capacity to control the border districts, both to remove the potential instability and also cut off supply-and-support links into Afghanistan. The initiative has been kept as very low-key rather than announced with a fanfare, but it actually involves a substantial increase in the role of US special forces training Pakistani army units (see Ann Scott Tyson, "Pakistan Strife Threatens Anti-Insurgent Plan", Washington Post, 9 November 2007).

This new partnership is in addition to the very large volume of military assistance that has flowed into Pakistan since the 9/11 attacks. These have totalled nearly $10 billion, a sum that includes around $300 million a year for weapons and equipment. The training budget has been much lower - perhaps £2 million a year - and it is this that is to be expanded. The Washington Post reports that "(the) security elements of the initiative are expected to cost $75 million to £100 million a year, including the cost of trainers, training facilities and light infantry weapons such as machine guns, as well as mortars, body armor, helmets, radios and trucks."

In current training programmes, US special-force units spend short periods of time in Pakistan to train army units. The intention is to transform this relationship by making the US presence larger and permanent, its operatives working both with Pakistan's own special-services units and with the frontier corps, a locally-recruited force in western Pakistan.

Two campaigns

The collapse of Washington's plan to manage the political succession in Pakistan is now calling into question the feasibility of its wider military strategy. Musharraf's recent actions and revelations about the degree of US involvement in the details of Pakistani politics have exacerbated an already strong anti-American mood, and on the shifting frontline so-called "neo-Taliban" forces are increasing their activities (see Syed Saleem Shahzad, "Rise of the Neo-Taliban", Asia Times, 13 November 2007).

In brief, the political turmoil in Pakistan could not have come at a worse time for the George W Bush administration. At the very moment it began to recognise the deteriorating security situation on either side of the Afghan-Pakistan border, and planned to strengthen the Pakistani army's counterinsurgency capacities, its chief ally Pervez Musharraf has become embroiled in a major internal crisis.

The assumption that the Taliban and the al-Qaida movement would be relatively inactive during winter 2007-08 has informed several projections of what is likely to happen in the coming period. It now seems flawed. There is every chance that this aspect of Bush's "war on terror" will begin to acquire as great a significance as the Iraq war around the time the US presidential election campaign is approaching full gear.

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A Pakistani dilemma, Paul Rogers